


Magic Words

by grayglube



Category: American Horror Story
Genre: Explicit Language, F/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-23
Updated: 2012-03-23
Packaged: 2017-11-02 10:20:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/367905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She tells him he’s dead but he never bothers to remember.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magic Words

**Author's Note:**

> This was finished right before the Finale and if you squint it fits canon, or at least it could fit canon.

How apt.

 

How fucking funny.

 

Or tragic.

 

They have the same conversation over and over and he’ll still go back to being wrecked over and over and she’ll keep getting disappointed over and over.

 

It’s groundhog’s day and the twilight zone and the outer limits over and over.

 

But all she can hope is that it doesn’t count as insanity if there really is the possibility of something else happening, eventually, after all the over and overs go around in too many loops and the string snaps or the gravity well of logic is overcome by the terminal velocity of wanting something badly enough that it’s a fanatical farce instead of true-blue tragedy.

 

Open Sesame, Abracadabra, Esuoh Tcetorp Flesruoy, and all the rest in a litany of magic words and self-assured taglines that only have as much power as a person believes they do. And maybe she doesn’t believe them.

 

Or maybe it’s not her that’s the problem.

 

Maybe he doesn’t believe them. 

 

And maybe that makes her the Byronic hero she’s thought he would turn out to be because she’s not even sure she really likes Byron herself or if she just likes reading it because he liked reading Byron and maybe found some solace or new world view or moral compass inside verses and similes and metaphorical turns of phrase.

 

She wonders if she can hold out and keep interest to outlast all the over and overs, she wonders how many times she’s going to blurt out or whisper or choke or scream the words at him, she wonders if she’s even supposed to keep telling him he’s dead and having the same argument or the same disbelief or the same quiet acknowledgment from him.

 

It doesn’t matter how she says it or why or when because for all the change in how it comes out the way things turn out is the same. He forgets and she doesn’t and the house remembers her moves and counters and sends him back after he leaves all cracked and fractured and not remembering that for awhile he’s known he’s dead.

 

Maybe he lets the house do it, maybe he realizes how much reality and self-awareness sucks, maybe all it’s going to take is him to not let the house do it, to say no, to not be so sure that being oblivious is really better than the truth, and it is but that isn’t the point.

 

She makes the point in her mind clear and concise that it’s like looking into the sun and burning it’s afterimage on her corneas. She knows he thinks it’s noble to kill off parts of himself for her, to die in fragments and chips and shards of thoughts, and dreams, and wants, and needs. One by one in a funeral procession of self-annihilation.

 

And that much isn’t worth shit, because it makes him a coward and it’s living for someone that’s hard. Dying is the easiest thing to do, the stupidest thing. The living thing’s hard, maybe in more ways than one since he is dead but it’s the thought that counts and he’s killing off his thoughts with bullets made from indecision and stinking fear.

 

And the house knows.

 

The house knows what he’s scared of.

 

And maybe in its own twisted way it’s not really trying to hurt people, maybe it wants to help but for all that help everything’s colored with just enough moral ambiguity that it hurts all the same like whiskey on road rash.

 

Hurting him.

 

Hurting her.

 

Because they’re both scared of the same thing.

 

And somehow, by the same token, that must mean they both want the same thing.

 

It means they’re both cowards.

 

He always says he’s sorry.

 

She usually tells him to go fuck himself.

 

They say a lot of things.

 

He says her name.

 

She tells him secrets.

 

**I had a dream, which was not at all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars did wander darkling in eternal space rayless and pathless, and the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;**

The first time was mostly because between discovery of just what type of existence he occupied and the days without sleep and his written declaration of love and swallowing a bottle full of pills and everything that came after all she wanted was to be exceptionally spiteful and because she hadn’t wanted to face another moment of inability to deal with suffering for shit that wasn’t her own baggage to carry around. The first time the words got stuck and didn’t come up until she’d admitted more than she’d wanted and they were dulled from too much time spent on the tip of her tongue.

 

They’re curled up together in bed with a book of birds he can’t remembering ever checking out but remembers seeing and her spilt ashtray and the heaviness of how broken they are and how the pieces of them don’t make something new and complete like they do in poems and art films.

 

So they fall asleep and they wake up and it isn’t the weekend so she has to leave.

 

_“I’m sorry.”_

 

He only said it after she’d extricated herself from the snare of his shirt inside her fists and it’s like he’s been the one holding her instead of the other way around.

 

_“I have to get dressed.”_

 

_“You’re leaving?”_

 

He seemed confused and lost at the prospect that he wasn’t her world.

 

_“I have to go to school. You know that place with books and laws against smoking and bitches that don’t wear real pants?”_

 

The joke is blithe but somehow to her it still seems like it fails to cover the truth that he isn’t her world, she’s her world and she wants him in it but that doesn’t mean she’s going to let him have her, she wants to have him and there’s a difference. She wishes he was different. Wishes he was strong enough to be her whole damn world. But he isn’t, not then.

 

Not even now.

 

_“You’re already late.”_

 

And parts of her hate him for it.

 

_“So?”_

 

_“...”_

 

It bothered her to see him so boyish and unable to give her a reason to stay, she hated his quiet acceptance.

 

_“If I stay and hang out, I’ll look around and everything will start to bother me.”_

 

_“You’re pissed off.”_

 

_“Ever wake up not knowing how you got somewhere and not remembering what you’ve been doing before?”_

 

_“Violet.”_

 

_“Don’t say my name.”_

 

She hated the way it had sounded, a plea instead of a demand to look at him, something she could ignore instead of automatically snap into action from.

 

_“I’m sorry.”_

 

_“That was a really shitty thing you did, Tate. Get out. I have to get dressed.”_

 

The way he’d done things was passive and she hated that too. And he made he think she was going insane, out of control, she doesn’t like those feelings and he knows that but did it anyway because it was easy and complex. It’s easy for him to be tortured and confusing and divergent, directness is hard for him she knows but there’s simplicity in hard things and she wishes he’d try. She’d wondered when he’d gotten so tame.

 

_“Violet?”_

 

_“Yeah?”_

 

_“Just...,”_

 

_“You’re sorry.”_

 

_“…”_

 

_“Yeah, okay.”_

 

And she’d pulled clothes out of drawers and he’d sat on her bed and watched her light a cigarette and he didn’t leave but he didn’t speak either.

 

_“I’m just skeeved out.”_

 

_“Over what.”_

 

_“Stuff.”_

 

_“Stuff like me?”_

 

_“…”_

 

She had hung her thumb nail on the edge of her bottom teeth and kept her eyes lower than her forehead, looking back and forth between him and her lap and felt so suddenly distraught and lost and sad and emotionally constipated.

 

_“Whatever.”_

 

And he’d seemed pissed for a moment and it calmed her, made her aware that maybe he hadn’t lost all of the things in him that were dangerous and bad and mean and malicious.

 

_“Not you, okay. Just…I’d…,”_

She scrubbed at her face with her hands and pulled at her hairline before tearing her fingers through her gnarled slept-on hair.

_“I’d rather not have what…I want,”_

 

His eyes were cold and hard and watching her throat when she swallowed to pause before looking up at the ceiling to think of everything she’d wanted to say.

 

_“If I can’t have it the way I want it.”_

 

But the look left his eyes and he was confused again and she had wanted to stomp her foot like a child.

 

_“What?”_

 

She had settled for blowing out her drag and stabbing out her cigarette in an empty cereal bowl left on her dresser.

 

_“It’s just not worth it then…because it’s not what you think it is, and afterwards you wonder why you bothered.”_

 

_“I don’t…get that. Are you alright?”_

 

He paused to really look at her and she wondered if he’d know what bullshit really sounded like because she was going to tell him she was fine. She did. She couldn’t tell him she didn’t want him, not like he was, she wanted him different, less how he is and more how he was. She liked that, it was honest and real and simple and bad for her like too much caffeine and too many cigarettes.

 

_“Fine, just. In a funk…I guess, I don’t know. If I can’t have things the way I want them then I’d rather not have them. And I don’t want that to be you.”_

 

_“What don’t you want to be me?”_

 

_“I don’t want you to not be worth it. I don’t like being so disappointed.”_

 

He was quiet for long it felt like a punch to her gut and her diaphragm moved in ways she didn’t want it to. It fluttered and clutched at her lungs and she’d been full of so much of that disappointment that saying the word had let it all out to yank on her ribs and cramp her sternum and try to smother her.

 

_“…You’re going to make yourself sick if you keep breathing like that.”_

 

She couldn’t breathe right then, she couldn’t grab any air and it had been awful and made worse to have him watch.

 

_“I know.”_

 

It had come out hissed and helpless.

 

_“Stop it.”_

 

He got up and she raised a hand to keep him steps away, she didn’t want a hug or a touch or comforting, she wanted to suffocate.

 

_“I know, I know. I can’t.”_

Every word was sputtered and shaky and he lit up a cigarette and held it out to her like it was a cure for her sudden unease.

 

_“Here.”_

 

The sudden sun burst of anger helped her, hit her like defibrillation of a bad heart rhythm.

 

_“I don’t want it. These past few days have been wrong. I didn’t feel like me, I felt like a mannequin brain and like I was stupid and wasn’t thinking right and my body just went along and did stupid stuff and I knew eventually my brain would be normal and the things I was doing would still be done and it’d be awful because mannequin brain wasn’t doing things the way I normally want them done.”_

 

_“Why are you crying?”_

 

And she was, had been, and it didn’t matter, she didn’t care.

 

_“I’m frustrated, I cry when I get frustrated bad enough.”_

His smile was small and she just sniffled and swallowed snot and wiped her eyes on the back of her hand.

_“Gimme my cigarette.”_

He did.

 

_“Are you going to school?”_

 

_“Uh-huh.”_

 

They sat on the floor and didn’t talk, she smoked, he watched, dogs barked next door and the house creaked like it always did.

 

_“You should stay home.”_

 

_“I don’t want to. I just need to not think until I’m not skeeved anymore.”_

 

_“You don’t like not being in control.”_

 

_“…”_

 

Her silence and her glare shut him up.

 

_“I’m sorry.”_

 

_“Go.”_

 

It was a command and some part of her hoped he wouldn’t listen.

 

_“Okay.”_

 

But he went to leave and she was angry again.

 

_“What is wrong with you?”_

 

_“…”_

 

_“Don’t just say Oh-fucking-kay!”_

 

_“What am I supposed to say?”_

 

_“That you_ know. _That you get it.”_

 

_“I don’t, not really. I don’t get it.”_

 

_“You’re dead. That’s why nothing makes sense.”_

 

Silence and smoke and he sighed.

 

_“…”_

 

_“You’re dead. You died.”_

She waved her hand.

_“Up in here, somewhere. They shot you because you shot up Westfield in ninety-four and you died and you’re mom has this psychic she hired to tell me that you don’t know you’re dead and they want me to help you cross over. That’s why those kids showed up on the beach and chased you and why you can’t leave this house and that’s why there’s the information gap between us and that’s why you’re so confused all the time.”_

 

_“…”_

 

_“It’s bullshit and impossible but it’s still fucking true.”_

 

_“I know.”_

 

_“Do you?”_

 

_“Yeah. I know.”_

 

_“…”_

 

She believed him, believes him still.

 

_“But it’s easy to forget.”_

 

And it’s just that simple.

 

_“Are you going to forget this?”_

 

_“Probably.”_

 

He shrugged like it was just an afterthought.

 

_“Fucking_ remember _this.”_

 

_“Not really up to me, Violet.”_

 

_“…”_

She knows what defeat feels like. It blows.

 

_“I’m not leaving.”_

 

The way he said it made her stomach clench and she knew he was like before, dangerous, normal in the way she considered him normal, fucked up but not broken by it. Fucked up in her favorite ways.

 

_“No._ You’re not _.”_

 

Her voice didn’t shake, didn’t waver and it wasn’t an affirmation or an agreement it was a law she was going to enforce. He wasn’t leaving. Never.

 

_“Will you?”_

 

_“No. I don’t think I will.”_

She gave him a sad smile that felt nice.

 

_“…”_

He gaped like a robot with coffee spilled on its circuit board.

 

_“I don’t think I’ll ever will.”_

Fuck think, she knew, she knows. She’s not going to leave either.

 

_“I wish I’d remember you saying that.”_

 

_“Me too.”_

 

_“…”_

 

She laughed bitter and old around her filter and spilled ashes into her lap before she looked back up at him and told him what she was supposed to but didn’t have the balls to before.

 

_“I do love you, you know?”_

 

_“Yeah, I do.”_

His expression made her mind fizzle out with a static hum and the popping bubble boop sound televisions make when they turn off. He looked amused, self-assured, like he should be swaggering across the room and that’s the version she likes of him best, it’s the side that knows he’s nuts and likes it too.

 

_“…”_

 

_“How much, Violet?”_

 

_“I love you so much I’d let you kill me.”_

 

She meant it, she still means it.

 

_“…”_

He stared at her like she’d told him to spank her, all curious and wide-eyed and wound up and thinking it was his birthday come early.

 

_“But only if you can remember I told you, later.”_

 

_“You’re cruel.”_

 

But he laughed like it was what he liked best about her.

 

_“And selfish.”_

 

Because she was.

 

She plucked cigarette butts off her comforter and tossed the stupid bird book across the floor and pulled him back into her bed. She was still tired and he was still dead and she couldn’t leave for something as trivial as school when she’d been the one to tell him the truth no one else would have ever and he wouldn’t have asked her again to stay no matter how much he wanted too because he couldn’t have dealt with another ‘no.’

 

She knew, so she stayed and the blankets were warm underneath from their bodies lying on top of them for hours. For awhile she planned not to give a shit about anyone except the boy whose heartbeat was under her palm when it should have been nonexistent, and she succeeded in the not giving a shit about things then.

 

It’s getting harder though.

 

**Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day, and men forgot their passion in the dread of this their desolation; and all hearts were chilled into a selfish prayer for light:**

It was early, too early to be up since she’d decided school was bullshit and if she didn’t have school then there was no point in being up at five in the morning, but she was awake and lay in bed with the rain on the windows turning the streetlamp light molten orange like sunrise over the ocean.

 

She listened to the rain and thought, when she stopped thinking she realized she’d stopped listening to the rain and sometime between the two moments she couldn’t divide it had stopped too. A car drove by and pushed a flash of illumination across her bedroom walls like a panoramic movie shove.

 

There was a stupid game she played with herself that she set into effect, when three more cars passed by she’d get out of bed, it was the fate game, silly inconsequential things and hapless action of nameless people made her decisions for her, happenstances of the next card being a nine or the second dish on the second row of the dishwasher being the mismatched one in the set, if three brunettes sit next to each other and on and on until she never had to make another choice on her own again.

 

It took seven minutes.

 

She got out of bed and looked out the blinds. Nothing. Rain. Streetlamps. Wet asphalt. Another car. Dying rose bushes. No boy throwing stones at her window.

 

Downstairs something broke, it sounded like glass. When she went down Moira was sweeping up shards with a dustpan.

 

“Decide to catch your bus this morning instead of sleeping in?”

 

“Not going.”

 

“Would you like breakfast?”

 

“Not hungry.”

 

She went out the backdoor and thumbed a cigarette out of her pack, flapping her feet on the wet concrete and flipping open her Zippo while looking at the sky all blotched gray and ready to hum with thunder.

 

It was cold and damp and miserable out, the wind was wet and when she sat down and leaned against the bricks the chill made her ass numb and her spine straighten with a vertebral click. She pulled her cardigan over her knees, slipped her arm inside the body of her t-shirt underneath and rested her palm against the bottom of her sternum.

 

His shoes slapped wetly through the puddles in the concaved patches of concrete. “You look sad.”

 

He sat down next to her and lifted her empty sleeve into his lap to pick at the frayed hem, her hand turned into a fist between her breasts and she lifted her cigarette to her mouth without inhaling the next drag.

 

“Just thinking.”

 

“About what?”

 

She stared down at her dirty toes and wet ankles, putting her cheek on her knee she turned her face to look at him from behind her hair.

 

“You know those things you can only come up with when you haven’t gone to bed yet that only make sense when you’re tired?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

He looked at her and put the end of the sleeve in his mouth the bite off a loose string.

 

“You always forget about them later.”

 

Her palm pressed over one breast and the inside of her elbow over the other, it was comforting, warm, not particularly sexual since there was discomfort growing in her nipples from the chilly bite of weather.

 

“Write them down.”

 

“It’s not the same,” It wasn’t, “I guess maybe that makes me a little sad. Jeez,” she turned and took in smoke, holding it for longer than she usually did.

 

“Tell me then.”

 

She put her forehead on her knees and blew out blue smoke into the stretch of cotton covering her legs and lap.

 

“People,” she paused not knowing if it was the right word to start with. It wasn’t. She took a drag and tried to think of a new one. “Everyone…in the whole world has something that someone else says or does that makes them go back to how they were before, brings them back to how they used to be.”

 

“Like a magic word.”

 

To bring a dead boy back to life, or make a girl not scared anymore, or a ghost go away, or stay. The idea was not a new one, it felt like an old friend, someone she’d known forever, something she’d always done, like breathing, or dreaming.

 

She nodded, too tired to verbally agree.

 

“But the thing about resetting something is that it’s always going to revert back to the way it was before you reset it.”

 

She opened her mouth on her knee and breathed into her shirt and skin wetly for the heat of it.

 

“Why?”

 

Her mouth had left a wet circle on the cotton; she put her chin on it to preserve the warmth.

 

“People’s habits don’t change, ingrained behavior, even if someone gets reset they just eventually go back to how they were before.”

 

“…”

 

She put her cigarette out and looked at him looking thoughtful and contemplative all early morning mood and disposition. Violet sighed, she felt like that all the time, any time, whatever time. For awhile now, anyway. It was strange that she couldn’t find the moment in time when it happened she realized, but it just had; maybe it had been happening, she realized, and she’d just never noticed.

 

“And you never know what your own reset cue is. So you just have to wait for someone else to say it or do it so all the bullshit gets cleared away for a little while and things make sense again, so you’re real again and not just made up of bullshit.”

 

“Violet.”

 

He never says her name the same way twice, this time it was soft awe and gentle confusion. It sounded nice, concerned, like she was some delicate thing he wanted to take care of.

 

“I’m fine. Tired.”

 

It came out sounding a little like bullshit and at first she thought it was, intended it to be, autopilot bullshit she’d have called it, but it wasn’t. It was honest. She _was_ tired. She’d been sleeping all night and most of the last afternoon, she wondered how she was so tired.

 

Slowly she wondered if she’d been sleeping at all. No. She hadn’t. She’d dozed but never really slept. She tried to remember the last time she’d slept and couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember being tired before she voiced it out loud. There had been sleepless, anxious, nights after Halloween but the last time she could remember exhaustion was after his written declaration of ‘three little words’ and before his vocal declaration of the same.

 

“Sorry, I’m just in one of those moods. I guess.”

 

It was the only way she could explain it.

 

He seemed to get it, raising his arm and reaching over her shoulders to tuck her against his chest, “Hey, come here.” Her fingers flexed around her breast and she trailed fingers over her nipple and it was sexual, unconscious but brought on by proximity to him, reflexive but sexual all the same. She ignored it, “You know what the worst part is though?”

 

“What?” He mouthed after breathing in her hair and skin.

 

“That you have to watch someone fill themselves back up with bullshit even after you reset them, so what’s the fucking point?” She pressed a kiss to the skin of his neck just because it was there and he smelt nice too and he was warm and hers and she could.

 

“So you don’t have to suffer so much for a little while,” she closed her eyes when he dipped to kiss her brow and then her eye lid, lashes fluttering over lips for a bare, spare moment.

 

“How selfish,” she mouths with lips curving on his sharp jaw.

 

“Yeah, it is. We’re all selfish,” he raises his chin to let her kiss his throat.

 

He looks at her like he remembers, maybe he does, she doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter, she decides. Finally.

 

And maybe she’ll suffer less by degrees if she lets him figure it out and tell _her_ he’s dead, maybe that’s the way it should work. Maybe things need to be more reciprocal for them to work; she’s told him too many of her own secrets without making him spill his own guts in return.

 

Maybe he needs to beg for her maybe he needs to crawl and grovel maybe he needs to decide if he needs her like he thinks he does. Maybe the house is sticking up for her, maybe it’s just a fucking house as sentient as a refrigerator and nothing more than that.

 

Maybe it’s up to him to decide if he’d rather certainties instead of maybes.

**And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones, the palaces of crowned kings—the huts, the habitations of all things which dwell, were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed and men were gathered round their blazing homes to look once more into each other’s face;**

 

Her and Leah had sat around and smoked cigarettes in a way that kept them separate from the other kids at the grind pool, they didn’t do it to be hipsters or score from the college boys that liked underage highschool girls and handed out Ambiens and Oxys for blowjobs like candy for good behavior, they sat around and smoked cigarettes and told the boys that creeped too close to go fuck themselves because they needed an outlet for their rage that was only starting to simmer under the low heat of frustration and routine and there was nowhere else to go to get their fix of leashed cruelty.

 

Every so often some stupid kid on a skateboard would fall and pop out their knee or knock their teeth loose from their gum-line and spit them out like they were throwing dice or tear a testicle from their sac on a rail and Violet would snicker. Their visits became more frequent and for longer intervals, the conversation would lull and burn down like their Marlboros but they’d end up rekindling the half-aware fear of the dark and basements and things that weren’t real until the last gruesome injury had gone by without another to follow for hours and they’d leave.

 

The pleasantries were the same and they greeted each other with ‘bitch’, ‘hoe’, douchebag’, ‘twat’, ‘asshole.’ Leah wouldn’t comment on the every present dark circles under her eyes or the long sleeve shirts and Violet avoided the scars on her face and the hickeys on her neck.

 

She was the closest thing she had to a friend.

 

They’d bounded over things that terrified them, a self-help group topic, a comparison of character faults, it was fucked-up-funny Violet knew, kind of sad, and a little humorous, but mostly just pathetic.

 

_“That story you told me about the red dragon, it’s the same one that carries the Whore of Babylon, right?”_

_“I don’t know if it’s the same Dragon.”_

_“Seven heads, ten horns, red.”_

_“I think that one’s a story of Rome. Symbolic. The other Dragon is definitely the devil though and the woman is Eve or Mary or something and the baby is supposed to be Jesus or someone.”_

_“That’s all pretty convoluted if you ask me.”_

_“Yeah, it is. What can you expect from a book written by more than one person?”_

_“I guess.”_

_“What was the question you asked?”_

_“Is it the same beast as the one the Whore of Babylon rides?”_

_“Oh, no idea. Maybe. Sorry I already answered and then made you ask again.”_

_“Full circle.”_

_“Though I think in the end the Whore of Babylon is overthrown by the ten kings who give power to the beast who god tells to overthrow the woman and it’s all very confusing.”_

_“Tell me about it. We need to stop talking about this Sunday school shit.”_

_“I know, I know.”_

_“But you know about the baby that the woman has up in Heaven that the beast wants to eat?”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“He shows up later on a white horse to kill everything and everyone left who’s an enemy of god and then everything pretty much ends with fire.”_

_“Brutal. You really went and read Revelations because I told you that story?”_

_“Internet.”_

_“Oh, good. Thought I had lost you to a lifetime of rosary beads and the cloister.”_

 

**Happy were those who dwelt within the eye of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch**

 

She’s changing her sheets methodically when he comes in later. It’s weirdly domestic. The old ones are heaped on the floor and there’s blood and the mess of sex on them and he feels a twisted sort of pride over being the first. He doesn’t know if she sees him standing in her doorway until she speaks without raising her head to look at him.

 

“Why did the skeleton go to the movies alone?”

 

“I don’t know, why?”

 

“He had nobody to go with.”

 

He hears the roughness in her voice, like she’s swallowed sandpaper and her esophagus is bleeding red raw. There’s a wild shine to her eyes and an awfulness in her that displays itself with a grim twist of her lips, he can hear the fevered slur in her speech.

 

She’s getting sick.

 

It’s not all that surprising. She smokes outside in the gray morning on rainy days, doesn’t sleep much anymore, and doesn’t eat like she used to, she tells him it’s because she wants to watch the sun rise or because she’s not tired or because she’s not hungry, he knows she’s a liar but he lets it go because he isn’t sure how to help or if she’d want him to.

 

“How do you feel?”

 

Her look is unamused, she’s lied and feels guilt she hadn’t counted on, her mother is being committed, her house is haunted, her dad’s been shot, she’s alone in the house and being asked dumb questions.

 

“I’m perfect,” she deadpans and he looks at her sheets pointedly.

 

He can’t dissect her tone into any meaning and it bothers him.

 

“I meant how do you feel, now. Does it hurt? Now?”

 

He knows it did, knew it when he first asked, but the thing about Violet is she’s a liar.

 

“Yeah, a little. I’m fine. Just sore.”

 

“I’m sorry.” He’s not. Not really. He can’t be because she’s a liar.

 

“Don’t be sorry, it’s supposed to hurt the first time,” it’s a mumble down at the fresh linens she’s stretching to fit over her mattress.

 

“But it didn’t only hurt, right. It was…good, too?”

 

He hopes there was something good about it for her, something she got out of it, something that’s measurable as good amongst all the other things she’ll always remember about her first time.

 

“Yeah, you’re a sex god, Tate. I had like twenty orgasms, I blacked out it was so good.”

 

“Shit.”

 

And it’s too much of a lie to be a lie; it’s so much of a lie that it’s a joke.

 

“Don’t worry about it.”

 

“So it sucked. ‘Intense’ was just a way to make me not feel like an asshole.”

 

Because parts of him do. He knows the reason behind the way she’d kissed him and pulled at him and told him to show her how much he loved her, all her words and the way she took off her clothes the way she looked at him when he pushed inside, a stare like a statue, far away, somewhere in her own head, her thoughts and senses with a delay and a lag during the span of time it took for him to touch and thrust and die right there between her legs with her hands on his face like she had no idea what he looked like even with her eyes open and staring at him like that.

 

“It was.”

 

And she’s looking at him when she tells him.

 

“Intense. Just…,” and she breathes in heavy and sighs like her lungs are collapsing, her tiny hands yanking on the fitted sheet so hard it comes off the corner of the bed and she fails to notice. “Can we talk about this later? I’m really tired.”

 

There’s finality in how she turns her head away and goes back to making the bed.

 

“Yeah, fine.”

 

He doesn’t want to go but he will because she knows just as much as he does how much of a liar she is and they both know just the same that whatever they did earlier, made love, did it, fucked, whatever it was it was so goddamn broken it mocks them both.

 

And he shouldn’t have let her because the whole thing feels like goodbye even after the fact, and he knows that that is what it was. The way he’d looked at her the night before from the steps of the house and the way she looked back over the hood of the car. He realizes looks can say a lot and whatever his was screaming made her wait in her room for him all morning after the police left and her mother called her father.

 

There’s still that twisted sort of pride that her flinging her virginity away at him like a trinket to remember her by when she’s finally realized that she’s not as all mighty as she’s hoped leaving it’s impression on  him.

 

Her absolute bottomless grief over the notion that she really has no control over what happens or where she’s going to go or how things are going to turn out is the most fascinating thing he’s ever watched for too long. And she makes a choice that ends up with him and her leaving a mess on her sheets and it’s lost all the grandness of a final choice and one last hurrah because she’s not leaving.

 

And that must sting.

 

He almost winces himself.

 

She would have waited if she’d known she was staying.

 

And he can sympathize.

 

But it’s still funny and he’s still her first and she’s still staying.

 

So he’ll leave, for now.

 

“Fuck, Tate.”

 

“What?”

 

Or maybe he’ll stay, he knows that liars like choices, he’ll let her decide what she wants.

 

“What did you think it was going to be like?”

 

“So good you’d black out.”

 

“Yeah, well…sorry.”

 

“I wanted it to be amazing.”

 

“Amazing…right.”

 

It wasn’t. Nothing to write an epic poem about because in real life there is no quiet moment of endless night for the glorious war hero and his virgin prize to crack open the earth with their frantic plethora of sexual voraciousness and fleshed out fantasies just as perfect when made reality, in real life there’s just cold feet on the back of someone’s calf and background noise to ruin the mood and fumbling and nerves and the glare of afternoon sun off of metallic odds and ends to catch someone’s eye at the wrong moment and make them ruin their rhythm.

 

“What?”

 

He asks because she sounds thoughtful.

 

“It’s going to take some time to work up to amazing, that’s what I mean,” she shrugs and punches her pillows back into comfortable fluffed shapes.

 

“Wait…what?”

 

He wonders if that means they get to practice.

 

“How many girls have you been with besides me?”

 

“None.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

She says it like it’s the proof to something.

 

“So?”

 

“So, you’re kind of new at this. You didn’t suck you just have no clue what you’re doing. I don’t either.”

 

“Practice makes perfect.”

 

“Go read a book or something instead for now, okay?”

 

It’s a dismissive statement and he tries not to put anything in his eyes that’ll shout disappointed at her.

 

“Okay.”

 

Something must still get a squeak out because she scowls and rolls her eyes at him, “It’s been seven hours, I need to rest.”

 

He could smack himself, yeah, rest, recently deflowered. He gets it.

 

“Oh, yeah.”

 

“…”

 

“What?”

 

He asks because there’s a grin on her mouth that’s full of nothing but sass.

 

“You thought I was being a bitch.”

 

“Yeah, a little.”

 

“…”

 

The grin fades but she smirks a little for show because she’s a liar when she’s not talking too.

 

“Can I hang out here? With you?”

 

“And watch me make a bed?”

 

“I could read.”

 

“Wanna go read sex tips on the internet?”

 

“Yes.”

 

She plays with her laptop and he sits down and she brings up pages for him to amuse himself with.

 

“Have fun.”

 

He dives forehead and catches her lips for a moment, they don’t move or part the way they have before, she pulls back and just stares for a moment before steeping back and rubbing her arms.

 

“Hey.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

She looks up without any curiosity.

 

“Did you even…,” he waves, “you know.”

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

“Did you get off?”

 

And he waits for an answer but all she does is turn back to her bed and toss her comforter open with a large wave from her elbows forward.

 

“You know what they say about asking.”

 

“No.”

 

“Of course not. If you have to ask then the answer is no.”

 

“So you didn’t?”

 

“No, I didn’t.”

 

“Fuck.”

 

Maybe she isn’t such a liar after all; he’s got the answer to that now too. She’s only mostly a liar; she’ll tell the truth if it hurts worse than the lie would. The truth fucking kills.

 

“It’s pretty uncommon the first time you know.”

 

“During not before.”

 

“Yeah, not so much before. I could have before we did it.”

 

There’s some sort of slant to her words he takes as remonstration.

 

“Shit.”

 

“…”

 

“Next time you’ll get two.”

 

“…”

 

“Girls can come more than once, you know.”

 

“Yeah, I know. They can get off a lot more than two, you know,” her tone is sarcastic and mean and she’s rolled her eyes more than once. The statement makes him grin.

 

“How many more?”

 

“A lot,” she informs him with crossed arms and indignant posturing with one hip cocked and her eyes sharp like a bird with a beak made for breaking bone.

 

“How many can you?”

 

“In one go?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“If I was trying?”

 

“Yeaaaah…”

 

“Over a specific period of time?”

 

“Are you purposely asking a lot of questions?”

 

Violet sits down and eyes her bed and his dick twitches at the idea of her doing it herself and having him count out loud, she doesn’t but when she looks back he knows she’s read his mind or near enough for her mouth to smirk.

 

“By myself over like an hour probably five, maybe six. It’s harder after the third one and if you don’t stop for like a minute after each it takes longer for the next one.”

 

He nods and turns away to her laptop and starts clicking things that go to other pages and reads, making lists in his head on things that seem like things she’d like that he could do to her, things that will feel good. He’s a smart boy and he decides that six is a good number to _start_ with. He can get six out of her. Maybe not in an hour but he can work on that.

 

**A fearful hope was all the world contained; forest were set on fire—but hour by hour they fell and faded—and the crackling trunks extinguished with a crash—and all was black.**

 

She was reading Goethe halfheartedly and lost in memories of the previous school year, it’s only after the sting of embarrassment is old and inconsequential that she could smile at how horribly she mispronounced the name of the main characters, not to mention the author and how her teacher corrected her and the rest of the class silently basked in the idea that there were, in fact, some things even she didn’t know.

 

It was an easy enough thing to scowl over for a moment but cast off upon reflection that the rest of her tenth grade class hadn’t been able to get through Lord of the Flies without having an aneurysm and trying to find metaphors for jungle vines while remaining blissfully unaware that the whole book was a twisted parody on another.

 

_“There’s only one thing worth selling your soul for.”_

 

She’d told him after she’d snapped the book shut to lie down on her stomach and switch to reading NANA instead.

 

_“Let me guess…eternal life. You know you’d get turned into one of those giant trees or a whale or something, that’s how that goes with the devil.”_

 

She’d wondered if he knew the story of Faust and was making a joke reference or if he was just pulling things straight from his mind.

 

_“Okay, no. Not ‘worth’. There’s only one thing with an even return to selling your soul.”_

 

_“…I can’t think of anything.”_

 

She smirked.

 

_“Because you’re a boy.”_

 

She’d turned a page and ignored his confused stare.

 

**The brows of men by the despairing light wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits the flashes fell upon them; some lay down and hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled; and others hurried to and fro, and fed their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up with mad disquietude on the dull sky, the pall of a past world; and then again with curses cast them down upon the dust, and gnashed their teeth and howled:**

_‘She was the Universe_.’

 

He stares at the words knowing Violet’s awake behind him in her cocoon of feather down and crocheted blankets and fleece pajamas.

 

“‘Darkness.’”

 

“Last cigarette in a pack,” she mumbles.

 

“What?”

 

“The poem. That’s what it reminds me off.”

 

He wants to know exactly what that means, he’s not really a smoker so he doesn’t understand himself but when he turns she’s already covered her head with her blankets and rolled onto her stomach, her face probably turned the other way on the pillow.

 

Even that isn’t enough to make him leave, he doesn’t really know if he’s supposed to, if the blankets over her head are a passive aggressive tactic to get him to take a hint.

 

“Hey.”

 

She doesn’t answer and he sits down on her bed giving the words written in chalk half a glance before tugging at her blankets. Her eyes are lazy and her mouth is puffing out warm, damp breaths half into her pillow. He watches her roll over onto her back and he tugs the blankets down further.

 

In the hazy, smoky light of her strung up five watt line of little lantern lights across the room he studies the shine of her skin stretching over the bony bulges of clavicle and rib because her top is open and the holiday pattern fleece bares it’s frosty the snowman decals as mirror images onto the inside of the fabric.

 

“Tate.”

 

Her hands reach up weakly to push hair from her face and throw the bulk of it over her pillow before flopping loosely on either side of her head, the too big pajama top catching up under her shoulders and the twist of her torso and he can see her delicate ribs rippling down her sides and a single wholly bared breast, cute and almost flat, a tiny gentle slope like her cheeks when they apple with an involuntary grin, and the pinkness of her nipple, soft and puffy and that’s cute too. Like the sleepy smile on her sweet little mouth.

 

There’s a rush of adolescent thrill, because her eyes have closed and there’s a thickness in his throat and his chest feels hollow with someone throwing dice inside his ribcage. And he thinks about touching her, until he realizes he can and suddenly he’s nervous, anxious, his heart practically palpitating over being able to reach out and smooth his fingertips down her skin.

 

She stretches and there’s her other breast slipping free of fabric to play peek-a-boo. Her eyes unlid by half and she smiles, tired, sloppy, and then wide and her body jerks like she’s falling in a dream.

 

“Tate.”

 

And she’s only realizing, belatedly that he’s actually sitting on her bed looking at her and she’s bemused by it, giddy over it because she’s too tired to notice she doesn’t have her filter in place to keep a lid on the parts of her that are like every other dopey teenage girl, parts that really really like him around and think he’s cute or whatever girls think about boys they like.

 

He grins.

 

Her eyes half-lid and she rolls back onto her stomach folding her arms under her chest and stretching a hand across her collarbone and one under the press of her stomach, fingers curling out from under her ribs.

 

The pajamas are too big and the elastic waist of them is across the swell of her ass baring pastel colored cotton at him, and her panties, as if at odds with her choice of sleepwear are tiny, clinging to firm cheeks he can see half of because of the perfect combination of one size too big and one size too small.

 

His hand smoothes under the fleece and runs the slope of her spine a curve of fever heat and he frowns at how warm her skin is, her scapula fits into his palm like the grip of a semi-automatic and she curves up into his hand with a soft exhale that moves her hair on the pillowcase.

 

He can’t tell if she’s fallen asleep or not, if she even knows he’s there on her bed anymore but he knows she’s too comfortable to move or do anything, to broach any protest, to stop him. He doesn’t know exactly how much he can get away with doing before she opens her eyes again like she’s dream falling but he wants to find out.

 

His knuckles trace the elastic edge of her panties and he runs a finger along the curve it’s settled red into the swell of her ass underneath, idly he wonders if she’s damp with want between her legs, he’ll stop there he decides firmly, even if she doesn’t wake up.

 

There’s the widening gap of fleece from skin and his palm open on the back of her thigh before his fingers slide inward and in-between her legs and then it’s like he’s the one falling out of flight in a dream, her skin is too hot and his hand is out of her pants like he’s burned himself, and he rolls her over  onto her shoulders and back hard and fast enough to wake her up and have her arms and hands moving to push at him and her mouth voicing protests to being awake.

 

“Hey, wake up. Look at me.”

 

His hands are on her burning cheeks and his thumbs on her chapped lips, gentle and soft.

 

“What?”

 

She weakly tries to push his arm away when it shadows her face and his palm flattens on her brow as his other hand is pushing hair off her face.

 

“I wanna go back to sleep.”

 

She turns out of his hands and puts her face in the pillow.

 

“Hey, you’re really warm.”

 

“I’m sick. Let me sleep, get off my blankets, I’m cold.”

 

He pulls them out of her hands when she reaches down blindly for them. She rips them back viciously and curls them into her fists which she puts under her body to keep him from getting to them.

 

She mumbles something into her pillow that sounds suspiciously like ‘asshole,’ and he smiles.

**the wild birds shrieked and, terrified, did flutter on the ground, and flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawled and twined themselves among the multitude, hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.**

The second time was less planned than the first and she thinks that that’s where things went badly. It was impulsive and done just to be done, it hadn’t seemed like a good idea but it hadn’t seemed like a bad one either. It just happened.

 

He’d thrown rocks again and climbed through her window.

 

_“How Shakespearean.”_

 

She told him in the midst of putting shirts on hangers.

 

_“We’re a regular patented tragic couple.”_

 

_“Are we?”_

 

_“A regular Romeo and Juliet.”_

 

_“‘Romeo and Juliet’ isn’t a tragedy.”_

 

_“Romantic tragedy, my mistake. Forgot you like specific terminology.”_

 

_“It’s a comedy, Shakespeare was an atheist.”_

 

At least she believed he was, she liked the popular unpopular opinion.

 

He’d been silent for so long a moment that she’d looked up to find him staring at her with a look she hadn’t been able to place in the set of his mouth and the clench of his jaw.

_“Death’s funny to you?”_

 

_“Juliet was a dumbass.”_

 

She told him moving to her closet to hang shirts in the prearranged color order she had going on to satisfy her laundry day OCD compulsion.

 

_“Dying for someone isn’t hard to do, it’s the easiest thing there is. Living for someone is hard. Existing for someone is hard.”_

 

He had been watching the back of her head she knew and when she closed her closet and turned back he’d turned his eyes to the wall to act like he hadn’t been.

 

_“Oblivion is bullshit, and at the end of the day Romeo and Juliet are just dead. Death isn’t romantic.”_

 

_“Can’t you just take it as they get to be together forever and it’s really a happy ending?”_

 

_“No.”_

 

His head had snapped back and his eyes drew up to meet hers, hard and challenging.

 

_“I can’t. When you’re dead you’re_ dead _.”_

_“What if you’re not?”_

 

It was then that she’d toyed with the idea that he knew he was dead, again. That maybe he’d snapped out of his own oblivion ghost funk he’d put himself in.

 

_“Death as in…oblivion, not as circle of life feeding the worms and the earth and the air and the sea type of thing.”_

 

_“So what if you die and there’s something after?”_

 

_“Then you exist. Just differently.”_

 

She’s shrugged and sat on her bed.

_“Like reincarnation?”_

 

He sat down to and propped himself up on his elbows and took in her room with careful consideration.

 

_“Sure, why not. Limbo or heaven or hell or ghosts, there’s a lot of options for existence, hence why oblivion is such a cop out.”_

_“How do you know they’re nonexistent after they die?”_

 

_“There’s no Romeo and Juliet part deux.”_

 

_“Lame.”_

 

She rolled her eyes and he smirked sideways at her. It had given her the urge to crawl over on top of him, she gave in and threw a leg over her hips and sat up, looking down at him.

 

_“Shakespeare wrote a play about fairies and another about a wizard if he wrote Romeo and Juliet knowing they’d exist together after death then he would have clarified.”_

 

_“Do you like Shakespeare?”_

 

He’d stretched out his index finger to trace the curve of muscle above her knee over and over again without any real interest; she pretended he was only trying to act like having her on top of him did nothing to raise his blood pressure. It did, he hadn’t fooled her then, he was a boy and she was a girl and she’d been sitting in his lap and she’d waited for something to pop up and say hello.

 

_“I read it when I was little, probably missed a lot of what he was saying. I’d probably like it more now if I ever reread it.”_

 

_“What’s your favorite play?”_

 

He looked up at her from under his fringe and his hand got bold enough to smooth over her thigh in a gentle caress, firm but nothing racy enough to not be on daytime television.

 

_“I want to say Titus Andronicus because they eat people and there’s ‘defiled forever’ tropes going on all over the place but really my favorite is Julius Caesar.”_

 

_“Why?”_

 

_“Because it’s the ultimate moment of do or don’t.”_

 

_“There is no try.”_

 

He’d laughed at his own joke.

 

She’d leaned in to see if he would lean back and avoid her mouth, he didn’t and she smiled before speaking and letting their breathing comingle and pick up.

 

_“No one cares that Brutus has agonized over the choice, just that he has done it or that maybe he wouldn’t.”_

 

_“That doesn’t answer the question.”_

 

She’d felt his chest rise hard against her own and felt his fingers press into her leg.

 

_“It just makes you realize that actions are the only thing that matter,”_ she ran her fingers over his jaw and pushed his hair back with her other hand, she’d watched the blue of his eyes thin with the widening of his pupils.

 

_“Cause and effect matter, words don’t,”_ she pulled a hand away and pressed it over his that had lain on the bed, looked at it and watched her fingers slide into the gaps between his own.

 

_“Because words can be truth or lies but actions are real and there’s truth in them because people only care about what they know,”_ she picked up his hand in hers and licked a line over his knuckles and relished his lungs bellowing against the inside of her chest hard enough to flutter into hers.

_“What’s real, what’s unambiguous, what they see as solid ground is truth,”_ her other hand had pressed on top of his other and dragged it under her skirt to hold her hip.

 

_“Actions already done are solid ground. It never matters why you do something, what motivates you, what forces your hand. Reality and action is truth because it’s tangible and fantasy and thought is a lie because it’s intangible.”_

 

_“That’s deep.”_ His eyes had been glazed and dreamy and it seemed so thrilling to her to get them looking like they had.

 

_“Thanks.”_

 

He’d smiled and she’d frowned, the moment died between them and he’d given a little laugh. It bothered her and made her irritated so she rolled off and lay on her back to stare at the ceiling and berate herself that he was an absolute idiot at the worst possible times.

 

_“No, really. You’re right. I get your whole Romeo and Juliet thing now.”_

_“People like happy endings, you know? That’s why Romeo and Juliet is made into this big love story with the perfect ending. In order to have a perfect ending it has to be a love story and a tragedy. If it’s a comedy it’s an ending that’s unsatisfying and messy and too much like real life to be fun to read.”_

_“But you like Shakespeare. Right?”_

_“I don’t like normal things, remember?”_

_“Normal is neat, generic.”_

_“Freak of nature is where it’s at, baby.”_

_“How freaky?”_

 

She’d grinned and rolled over onto her side to appreciate the way he waggled his eyebrows and smirked down at her.

 

_“Way to be a guy.”_

 

She acknowledged with a sarcastic head shake and eyebrow raise of her own.

 

_“You don’t like girls, do you?”_

_“No!”_

 

_“Then why shouldn’t I act like a guy?”_

 

The honest tone made her pause and consider him for a moment, she’d tried to figure out is he was screwing with her to be a jerk or if he was being naturally cute and boyish.

 

_“You don’t have to remind me you have a dick, is what I meant. The innuendo is a little superfluous.”_

 

_“What’s wrong with innuendo?”_

 

_“It’s like an added layer of bullshit to wade through.”_

 

_“Specific terminology then?”_

_“More like explicit dialogues.”_

_“Did you just ask me to talk dirty to you?”_

 

And the moment between her mind trying to come up with an answer and the asking was filled with unrestrained word vomiting on her part.

 

And then she told him.

 

And showed him the proof.

 

And then he left.

 

And suddenly in the span of somewhere between eight to ten minutes everything went to shit.

 

And she was left feeling like an absolute moron.

 

She came down the basement stairs like a hurricane giving him just enough space and ground treaded to be able to disappear if he wanted to, but only if he was willing to let her see him do it, he didn’t and they stood in the basement with enough space between them to hold all their conjoined bullshit.

 

_“Fuck you.”_

 

She’d hissed at his back.

 

_“I’m sorry.”_

 

_“What a cop out.”_

 

She sneered and he’d turned looking angry.

 

_“Didn’t know you were such a coward.”_

 

He’d challenged.

 

_“_ I’m _a coward?”_

 

_“Are you deaf?”_

 

_“Just clarifying since you’re demented and tend to forget shit.”_

 

_“You’re a bitch.”_

 

_“I’d rather be a big bitch than a little bitch.”_

 

She’d wanted to get the last word in so she’d turned to go up the stairs.

 

_“You’re the one running away because you’re_ scared _, so that makes_ you _a fucking liar too.”_

 

But he’d hit a nerve so she’d swung back around with the banister rolling under her palm and leaving a splinter in its absence when she lunged down with a stomping thud to the cement floor three stairs below like some monster dropping in to say boo.

 

_“This_ isn’t _running away, this_ isn’t _fear, it’s self preservation. But I guess since you’re dead self preservation doesn’t really come into play anymore.”_

 

_“Do I look like a ghost?”_

_“Do dead people have to look like ghosts?”_

 

_“…”_

 

He scoffed.

 

_“Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you don’t exist.”_

 

_“…”_

 

_“And being dead doesn’t absolve you of the bad shit you’ve done.”_

 

_“I’m not asking for forgiveness.”_

 

But his head had been bowed and his eyes narrowed with spite and insolence like a child who knew they were wrong but wanted to argue their way to being right.

 

_“What’s the ‘I’m sorry’ for then?”_

 

_“…”_

 

_“And being dead isn’t your get out of jail free card for being a shithead. If you want someone to feel sorry for you try your mom because you won’t get it from me. I’m not a fucking shoulder to cry on.”_

 

_“I know.”_

 

She’d thrown up her hands and slapped them against the side of her thighs to belay her aggravation.

_“Then stop looking for sympathy. You’re dead, what the fuck have you got left to worry about? What rules are you worried about breaking? What the fuck else can happen?”_

 

She’d wondered to herself if he’d realized they were arguing about arguing that she was saying it didn’t matter and he was saying it did and it was the worst possible reversal they could set into play.

 

_“I’m a bad person.”_

 

_“Yeah, so?”_

 

_“Being dead doesn’t change that.”_

 

_“Annnnd?”_

_“I’m fucking nuts and dead and you’re too fucked up to give a shit.”_

 

There was something hilarious in the way the whole discussion turned out, played out as some trite little squabble that they went along with because the only way they knew how to confront a problem was with a confrontation with angry words and tones that would have gotten a kid smacked in the mouth.

 

_“Why should I? I’m not dead, you are. Score one me. What the fuck can you do? You’re dead, Tate.”_

 

_“You think a dead person can’t kill someone?”_

 

The admission made her flounder and she knew that beneath all the bullshit that she should be scared, and she had been, was, a little, but it didn’t matter. Fear had always shown up with friends, need and want, or anger and pride, sometimes teenage lust and teenage idiocy.

 

_“You think a dead person can’t suffer?”_

 

_“I could kill you.”_

 

She sneered.

 

_“You think I’m kidding?”_

 

He took a step and it was for show.

 

Even if it hadn’t been she wouldn’t have moved.

 

_“It’d be easy.”_

 

He’d crowded her space, close enough to touch her, for her to touch him.

 

_“So goddamn easy.”_

 

But she hadn’t liked him treating her like she should think she was prey, she took the step he’d been about to forward.

 

_“I’d re-kill you worse.”_

 

He froze.

 

She studied the feeling that bloomed like blood in water in her chest, he froze because he’d been bluffing and she hadn’t been.

 

_“Wanna test that theory?”_

 

_“What? You wanna kill me? Can you? You can’t even fuck me, ghost boy.”_

 

_“Don’t remember trying to.”_

 

_“Oh, yeah. That’s right, I tried, you didn’t. Guess modern pharmaceuticals are potent enough to work on phantom dick.”_

 

_“…”_

 

_“And I guess being dead doesn’t mean shit since it changes shit, you’re still just as scared of things as when you were alive. You’re so fucking dumb, that’s like going to sleep and thinking everything will have just worked itself out by the time you wake up.”_

 

_“Is there a point you’re trying to make?”_

 

The mood changed instantly, the volatile had hardened into the tangible and they weren’t just throwing barbs at each other that were blustering attempts of pushing the other too far.

 

_“Make a fucking effort, your dead not comatose, fix your shit and work it out. I’m not going to bother otherwise, why should I? I’m alive and have to take of my problems, you think being dead means you have no responsibility, nothing to answer for? You’re a child, and you’re weak, and right now you’re not worth my time.”_

 

_“What?”_

 

He looked at her as if she’d started to rattle off the number sequence of pi. She crossed her arms and leaned forward to get close and have to crane her neck up to glare at him, feeling as pugnacious as she must have looked.

 

_“You’re being lazy, I don’t like that. Man up. Do something. If you wanna wallow in your angst go ahead but I’ve got shit to do. Go find someone else to haunt if you don’t feel like growing up.”_

 

_“Violet.”_

 

_“You heard me. Fuck off.”_

 

She turned fast and hard enough to send her hair whipping into his face.

 

_“Wait. What are you trying to say?”_

 

She’d paused on the stairs and looked over her shoulder.

 

_“I fucking like you, and when you act like I shouldn’t it’s like saying you hated doing the things you did and that means you’re lying when you tell me you like me.”_

 

_“I do.”_

 

He nodded in affirmation of his words.

 

_“Then own it or bail, Tate. If you weren’t ‘fucked up’ you wouldn’t have been around that night and I’d be dead in my fucking bathtub, but I’m not.”_

 

_“Because I made sure they couldn’t hurt you.”_

 

_“Yeah. Whatever that means.”_

 

_“…”_

 

_“You kill them?”_

 

_“One of them.”_

 

_“And made sure the other two got dead?”_

 

_“Yeah.”_

 

_“Good.”_

 

_“Good?”_

 

She hung her head and shook it before she dropped down the stairs and recrossed her arms.

 

_“Yeah, why wouldn’t it be? You see that’s the problem, I don’t think you get it. Do or don’t, Tate. That’s all it’s about, doesn’t matter how or why, just do it or don’t. Stop worrying about whether or not you’re going to do something that will scare me.”_

_“Because you’re not scared of anything, right?”_

 

_“Yeah, exactly. Are we good now?”_

 

_“Yeah, we’re fine a regular Caspar and Wendy.”_

 

_“Good.”_

**And War, which for a moment was no more, did glut himself again: a meal was brought with blood, and each sate sullenly apart gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;**

She was standing in front of the stove with her sweater stretched open above the slanted oven door, he might have been worried but it was electric not gas and she seemed particularly unconcerned as she hunched over the wafting heat with a book open on the unused stove.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

“Sweating.”

 

“That doesn’t work.”

 

Truthfully he didn’t have a clue how to get off a cold besides suffering or sleeping through it. She looked worse than the night before, and she was still wearing the same pajamas and bedraggled hair from when he’d seen her last.

 

“I know, I had a dream.”

 

He waited for an explanation but none came and she seemed more interested in her book then him, it stung a little but he shrugged it off.

**All earth was one thought—and that was death, immediate and inglorious; and the pang of famine fed upon all entrails—men died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;**

_“You said the reason why I couldn’t think of anything with an even soul return was because I was a boy.”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“I thought of something.”_

_“Did you?”_

_“The Devil’s love.”_

_“You know why nobody trades their soul for it?”_

_“Why?”_

_“Because he’s absolutely irredeemable, no matter what he says or what he does he’s always going to be the_ Devil _. And people have this thing about how they think of love and they have no clue what it’s really supposed to be like.”_

_“What is love like really?”_

_“A fairytale. A real one. Not the type of fairytale people think of now, because that’s not what a fairytale really is. Fairytales aren’t sweet or nice, they’re about change and pain and need…, or greed that ruins everything, which you let ruin everything.”_

_“…”_

_“And if that’s what normal love is then imagine what the Devil’s would do to a person.”_

_“Would you sell your soul for it?”_

_“I don’t believe in the Devil, Tate.”_

_“What do you believe in?”_

_“I believe that love isn’t about you and another person and the rest of the fucking world, just you and someone else and having them already be what you want.”_

_“Irredeemable people need love too.”_

_“People think they need love, they don’t. They just want it. And if you want something bad enough it doesn’t matter if it ruins everything. And if it does ruin everything and you still want it then that’s true love, you know?”_

**The meager by the meager were devoured, even dogs assailed their masters, all save one, and he was faithful to a corpse, and kept the birds and beasts and famished men at bay, till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead lowered their lank jaws; himself sought no food, but with a piteous and perpetual moan, and a quick desolate cry, licking the hand which answered not with a caress—he died.**

 

“Thought you decided not to come near this place ever again.”

 

She had never figured to see the other girl on her front steps, but she was there in her awful hat and tight designer jeans, an armful of textbooks and manila folders with post-it messages with page numbers and due dates.

 

“Yeah well I wasn’t,” Leah states firmly before tilting the books on her hip and sighing heavily. “But you haven’t been to school and that fat ass bitch saw us talking in Chem and thinks we’re like carpet munching each other best friends and gave me all this shit and it’s been sitting in my car and even though you live in the Amityville Horror house times ten I figured maybe if I could make myself actually come near it maybe it’d be like progress.”

 

Violet watches her chew the inside of her cheek and her teeth tear a piece of the inside of her mouth judging by the pained hiss she lets out before adding, “Or some shit like that.”

 

“You wanna come in?”

 

“No.” Leah raises her eyebrows and swivels her head to give her a look that should be patented as ‘You’re delusional’.”

 

“Wanna go in the backyard,” it’s supposed to be a question but she’s already shutting the front door behind her and moving forward down the front steps to go around the other girl.

 

Leah doesn’t move and Violet stops to look over her shoulder at the girl still facing the front door for a moment more before turning halfway and pursing her lips in a pouty little mauve colored pucker before tilting her chin up in disgust, “I’m leaving before it gets dark.”

 

“I don’t blame you,” she tells her already walking around the side of the house unconcerned by the return of the cokehead queen bee’s haughtiness for everyone besides herself. They settle in the unstained wood circle of the gazebo. She perches herself on a railing and lights a cigarette while watching the other girl drop the pile of books in her arms unceremoniously at her feet.

 

It rattles the entire structure around them.

 

“I don’t know how you can just not show up at school and hang out here all day,” Leah comments stealing one of her cigarettes and leaning back against the railing watching sheets billow on the line next to a mish-mash of laundry that once again includes her father’s.

 

“I stay in my room and sleep a lot.”

 

The other girl gives her a thoughtful looks that Violet knows heralds an onslaught of unwanted, unhelpful advice.

 

“Not really my problem but…you’re going to fail all your shit.” Leah doesn’t look at her while she tells her what she already knows, Violet just shrugs.

 

“Doesn’t matter I’ll probably have to repeat a year when my parents get their divorce and me and my mom have to go live with my aunt and then you know eventually move somewhere else when my dad cuts her a check for being a dickhead and by then it won’t really matter that I failed trig and chem. Because I’ll be taking them again one way or the other.”

 

“Well then fuck school, why bother?”

 

“Yeah, I know. That was my point.”

 

They smoked in silent camaraderie, like soldiers in a trench or doctors fifty feet away from a hospital entrance or highschool kids crouched between cars in the visitors’ parking lot.

 

“You look like shit by the way,” Leah told her with a sideways glance.

 

In some unexpected way it chafed irritatingly to be told what she already knew, like she didn’t own a mirror or that the other girl’s opinion fucking mattered and was the voice of god or something.

 

“I’m sick and I have weird freaky dreams and lately it’s like they’re trying to broadcast advice on how to deal with shit in cryptic ass ways and yeah I know I’m wearing a scarf and it’s sixty out but dream advice told me to sweat a fever out.”

 

“What did you dream about?”

 

The anger turned itself down to make way for exhaustion, and she slumped over and stared at the wood floor of the gazebo no one had the time to finish in the midst of parental bickering and psych patients.

 

“I didn’t really know until after I woke up.”

 

“It gave you the idea to sweat out your fever.”

 

She didn’t really want to talk about it because dreams never came out right when talked about with someone else and the other person never really got the whole thing but she just took a drag and started talking, “I realized something; if Hell is really hot then sweat must evaporate right? So if something from Hell came up on Earth then…”

 

Violet turned to look at the other girl for her to fill in the blanks, to see if she got where she was going with the explanation without having to outright explain it.

 

“They’d sweat a lot?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Leah’s mouth twisted in the corner, an unattractive scowl of disgust, “Gross.”

 

“It was a sex dream,” Violet clarified.

 

“You were having sex in Hell?”

 

“I was finding out what Devil sweat tastes like.”

 

Taking three more drags while Leah stared at her in absolute silence probably deciding whether to just start walking back to her car or actually stay and tell her she had finally cracked Violet waited for a reactionary response. All the other girl did was shake her head and tap ash off her cigarette and inhale before shaking her head with a small smile that Violet didn’t buy for a second as real.

 

“Weird dreams are a side effect of those pills, maybe you should take half of one and start weaning off.”

 

“Yeah, maybe.”

 

Violet decided that maybe pretending like they were just highschool girls oblivious to shit that was impossible and how much the possibility of her house being a demon portal was closer to fact than fiction, or that there weren’t any more pills to take half of, or that the puckered red scars forming on the other girl’s face were from Chanel envy rather than the boy who she herself wasn’t just kinda sorta friends with but was fucking and completely in love with wasn’t that bad of an idea.

 

“Sooooo…what’s the Devil’s sweat taste like? Diesel fuel? Baby’s blood?”

 

“Sweat. Just sweat.”

 

Salt and heat, she remembered the taste. She remembered the feel of him too, slick and familiar, and how when she closed her eyes the difference between his sweat and her blood disappeared in that way of dream logic.

 

She leans her head back to study the underside of the gazebo roof, it’s domed only slightly but it reminds her of chapels with painted ceilings, she wonders if she has the artistic ability for making fat little cherub children and angels and old men with beards in pen and paint.

 

“When can you take European History here?”

 

“It’s an advanced placement class, so you don’t really have to.”

 

“I took it last year at my old school.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Do you know about Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome?”

 

“No.”

 

“Well it’s a giant church, I guess, and the pope at the time wanted to build it but they didn’t have enough money. So you know what they did?”

 

“What?”

 

“They sold indulgences.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“It’s something you buy to get your dead relatives out of purgatory; it’s a piece of paper with words on it.”

 

“That’s crazy.”

 

“It worked.”

 

“What’s your point?”

 

“It’s kind of amazing what people believe, depending on who’s telling them.”

 

“I guess.”

 

**The crowd was famished by degrees; but two of the enormous city did survive, and they were enemies: they met beside the dying embers of an altar-place where had been heaped a mess of holy things for an unholy usage’ they raked up, and shivering scarped with cold skeleton hands the feeble ashes, and their feeble breaths blew for a little life, and made a flame which was a mockery; then they lifted up their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld each other’s aspect—saw, and shrieked, and died— even of their mutual hideousness they died, unknowing who he was upon whose brow Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,**

The third time it all happened was on accident, she hadn’t known she’d been telling him, hadn’t been trying to but she figured maybe she did, a little bit. She can’t really remember if she was trying to tell him or if he just had a light bulb flicking on moment in his brain and illuminating things all on its own. She still isn’t sure.

 

He’d been sitting in her chair reading, quietly, smirking, pleased with himself about something it seemed to her.

 

_“What are you reading?”_

_“’The Witching Hour’.”_

_“Gimme.”_

 

She held out a hand and waited for him to hand it over. When he didn’t she’d made to swipe it out of his hands but he cradled it protectively against his chest and smiled.

 

_“I’m reeeeading.”_

 

She looked down and pondered the amount of pages on either side of his index finger sandwiched in the novel.

 

_“You read that much already?”_

 

_“Nope, reading your underlines. I can’t believe you annotate.”_

_“I can’t believe you know that word.”_

_“I can’t believe you underline all the sex in this.”_

 

She decided that was what the smirk was for.

 

_“Shut up.”_

 

He started reading, out loud, and it was worse because she knew she’d been the one to underline the passage. And what was worse still than any of the already messed up things about her boyfriend reading explicit excerpts she’d all but bookmarked was which one he’d read with a smirk and lidded eyes studying her for a reaction to mentions of cocks and kneadable bottoms and goading by way of pillow talk that included missives to ride someone hard and brutal furious fucking.

 

_“Shut up!”_

_“Distracting?”_

_“Annoying.”_

_“Do I not have a good voice for reading out loud?”_

_“Just shut up.”_

 

She dropped onto the bed and tried to will the hot blush of her face and the warm wetness between her legs away.

 

_“You know I really like this Lasher guy.”_

_“Of course you do.”_

 

She’d scowled when he sat cross legged on her floor and looked up at her cross legged on the bed.

 

_“He’s just looking for love.”_

 

She’d snorted and his eyebrows had ridden up his face almost to his hairline at how loud it was.

 

_“No he’s not.”_

_“No?”_

_“He’s looking for the perfect specimen to make him a new body.”_

_“Like Frankenstein?”_

_“No like stealing Rowen’s baby and making it his new body. He wants to be alive. He doesn’t want to be like he is anymore.”_

_“What is he?”_

 

She had to pause and dig through her brain for the right words.

 

_“He’s an incorporeal force.”_

 

She waved a hand.

 

_“He’s an incubus.”_

 

On the floor looking up at her she couldn’t help but feel like maybe he should put the same definition to himself at that moment.

 

_“The sex is a ploy. He’s just using his ghost penis as weaponry.”_

_“They seem to like it.”_

 

He grinned.

 

_“Superficially.”_

_“How so?”_

 

The question seemed silly.

 

_“What is this? Oprah’s book club?”_

_“Come on what’s your theory?”_ He had risen up on his knees and put his hands on either side of hers and peered up at her. _“What makes ghost penis so intoxicating.”_

 

She pressed her shoe to his chest and pushed him away, he let her and fell back supine on the floor dramatically before he propped himself up on his elbows and shook his hair out of his face.

_“It’s going to happen anyway, it’s the only thing he’s got to use so he’s going to use it and only Marybeth and Carlotta get that. All the other Mayfair women think they can fight that or use it but Lasher’s been playing the game for a lot longer than everyone else, Deborah may have understood but she didn’t have the whole advantage of having Lasher around for generations before her to know how he worked.”_

 

_“I don’t know who all those characters are.”_

_“Well okay Marybeth is really the first Mayfair woman to realize that Lasher is going to be Lasher and act like Lasher and the only way to get what she wants, power, wealth, status for her family, is to play along and be just as cunning as Lasher and it’s a whole balance thing so she makes them equals and uses Lasher as a tool as much as he uses her as a tool and the whole dynamic works. Now Carlotta who’s Marybeth’s daughter is the oldest daughter and is set to inherit Lasher at some point but I think Marybeth knew that if Carlotta would one day overthrow her she purposely acted in ways that made Carlotta not want to have Lasher and to want to be the black sheep, to never say his name or want to use him so she could reign as Queen Witch or whatever for as long as she could, and she does.”_

_“What happens to Carlotta?”_

_“She says fuck you, moves out, never gets married, never has children, makes her own way and in her own way she’s like a Queen Witch bitch too, just one that is the only one in her kingdom. She’s selfish in her own way and not about to let something else control her.”_

_“So she gives everything up?”_

_“Yeah.”_

 

He made a sound like a click, his tongue against his teeth and she saw the pink of it in his mouth and it had made her skin feel tight and suffocatingly close.

 

_“Stupid.”_

_“You have to read the whole book to get the big picture.”_

_“She sounds like an idiot.”_

_“Why?”_

_“Because in the end she dies, old, alone and completely joyless.”_

 

She’d shrugged and fell back on her bed, stretched out her legs and put her arms under her head to talk to the ceiling.

 

_“She’s still my favorite.”_

_“Why?”_

_“Because she’s strong.”_

_“How?”_

 

It was easier to talk without having to look at him she’d decided, it was always easier to tell secrets in the dark too. If the lights were off she knew she’d tell him all sorts of things, but they hadn’t been, so she’d closed her eyes and pretended.

 

_“Because she’s alone and no matter what anyone can offer her it’s not going to be what she wants, she’s not going to be charmed by easy titles or money or power because all that means nothing if it’s just inherited and if she failed to live up to her mother’s legacy it just makes her another one of Lasher’s toys, another Mayfair witch, and she won’t be like that.”_

 

_“She’s scared so she left.”_

_“I don’t think so. She’s brave.”_

_“She runs away from what’s supposed to be hers and leaves her sister who’s weak and ineffectual to take on something that isn’t her job, she’s cruel.”_

 

There was something in his voice that sounded like contempt. Old and bitter, maybe a little broken and betrayed too.

 

_“So? She’s still strong.”_

_“I don’t buy it; it doesn’t say that in the book.”_

_“She’s offered the keys to the kingdom and she says fuck off. Lasher’s going to make her a fucking Queen to a family clan of the richest most influential people in existence and she still says fuck off. You know why?”_

_“Why?”_

_“Because she’s worth more to herself than anything else in the world and she’s not going to take something that isn’t up to par to her, Heaven may be great but she won’t take it if it’s got the wrong color scheme, despite the fact that she could fix it, she doesn’t want to fix things she wants what she wants and if it isn’t already what she wants, fuck off. She’s ballsy and brave and smart.”_

 

The bed moved and she kept her eyes closed even when she felt his elbow against hers, even when she knew his posture on the bed mirrored hers.

 

_“So she makes her own crown and her own kingdom, population uno.”_

_“Yeah. She’s a complete person; she needs nothing and wants nothing she can’t get for herself.”_

_“Would you rather be Marybeth or Carlotta?”_

 

She’d opened her eyes and moved up onto an arm to study him, lying back on her bed, arms under his head, shirt stretched tight over his chest and riding up his stomach, she’d wanted to reach out and trace the lean musculature just barely peeking out. She hadn’t. But she’d thought about it before answering, before his eyes had peeked open, almost catching her.

 

_“…I don’t know.”_

_“Come ooooon.”_

_“It’s not something you could know ahead of time.”_

_“Ahead of time of what?”_

 

_“Someone offering you the keys to the kingdom.”_

 

His eyes shifted to hers.

 

_“What if someone was?”_

 

She shifted hers away.

 

_“That type of shit depends on a lot of other shit, Tate.”_

_“Like what?”_

_“The weather that day, whether I’ve run out of cigarettes, when I’m being asked, before I go to bed, right when I wake up, after lunch, if I’ve got a science lab due or trigonometry homework if I have enough caffeine in me to kill a small horse.”_

_“If Lasher is a good fuck.”_

 

She’d looked back to catch him giving her a shit eating grin.

 

_“Carlotta never fucks Lasher.”_

_“Why not?”_

_“Because he infuriates her and makes her feel like it’d be the best feeling ever to be weak for awhile but she hates being weak and it doesn’t matter how much it feels good it’s still weakness and Carlotta wants to be something more. She wants to be an example, an icon, an epitome of power on her own terms.”_

_“Do you think she wishes she could be someone else, so she could have Lasher?”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“…”_

_“If she were a real person, yeah. No one wants to be that person who can always be alone and okay with that. No one wants to be that.”_

_“…”_

_“Maybe Carlotta considered having this great love affair partnership with Lasher but that’s not in the book, it’s just speculation.”_

_“If she was a real person though it might have been like that.”_

 

She laid back and turned her head to look at him like he looked at her, she chewed her bottom lip.

 

_“When do two people who are absolutely right for each other get tired of dancing around and finally get it together?”_

_“I don’t know.”_

_“Never.”_

 

She smirked.

 

_“Really?”_

 

He smiled.

 

_“Never.”_

 

She shook her head.

 

_“How sad.”_

_“You think so? I don’t.”_

 

She turned her face to the ceiling again.

 

_“You probably think it’s perfect and poetic.”_

_“No, just simple. Nice.”_

_“More like tragic.”_

_“Yeah, exactly.”_

_“You’re weird.”_

_“Guess so.”_

_“You get off on the whole idea of tragic love.”_

_“What’s more romantic than that?”_

_“Romantic love.”_

_“Romance is tragic.”_

_“I guess it is.”_

_“Don’t just agree with me, it’s annoying. Have an opinion.”_

_“Oh well, sorry. I’ll try.”_

_“Nobody cares if you agonize over the choice, just make a decision.”_

_“Yeah?”_

_“To be or not to be.”_

_“Uh-huh.”_

_“Do or don’t there is no try.”_

_“Is the result all that matters? Always?”_

_“To everyone besides yourself, yeah.”_

_“So it doesn’t matter why, ever?”_

_“No. Just what you did about it. That’s all that matters. You can’t prove something you feel with actions, just words.”_

_“What if someone doesn’t believe you?”_

_“Then they don’t.”_

_“Tragic.”_

_“Yeah, isn’t it?”_

 

They lapsed into silence. She mimed for a cigarette and he’d grabbed her pack and put one in her open mouth before flicking flame up from her Zippo.

 

_“…”_

 

He stared at her.

 

_“What?”_

 

_“Does this make me your Lasher?”_

 

She laughed.

 

_“I don’t know, you got ghost mojo to fuck me with anytime, anywhere, anyhow?”_

_“Why would I need that? I’m a real boy.”_

_“Then you can’t be Lasher can you? He’s incorporeal.”_

 

_“I’m trying.”_

 

She’d been confused by the look he’d given her, the way his eyes had moved over the stretch of her body as he laid her coffee mug ashtray next to her on the bed.

 

_“You’re trying what?”_

_“To violate you in horribly profane ways is it working...can you feel it?”_

 

His tone brought back the hot wetness she’d been trying to ignore between her thighs.

 

_“Can I feel what?”_

 

She was glad her own tone didn’t betray her.

 

_“My ghost mojo.”_

_“Ahhhh, ohhh, yeah.”_

 

She cried out, with a wild thrash on the bed before she broke out in unrestrained laughter and ashed her cigarette in the coffee mug.

 

_“You sound like someone hit you with a brick.”_

 

He deadpanned.

 

_“Like I’d say ‘yeah’ to getting hit with a brick.”_

_“Don’t know, you into that shit?”_

_“Depends on who’s throwing the brick.”_

_“Yeah?”_

 

She sat up and he looked curious, thoughtful.

 

_“I guess. Haven’t thought about it.”_

_“Pfft, liar.”_

_“Okay.”_

 

She’d rolled her eyes and taken a long drag.

 

_“Come on, what’s your freak limit?”_

_“My freak limit is a line that brick throwing doesn’t quite cross, or crosses, whatever, no brick throwing.”_

_“What doesn’t cross the line?”_

_“Use your imagination.”_

_“You got a pair of handcuffs?”_

_“Nope.”_

_“Blindfold?”_

_“Nope.”_

_“Then you’re not even a little freaky, how tragic.”_

 

He flopped back onto her pillows and had thrown an arm across his face. She puffed on her cigarette thoughtfully.

 

_“You did put on that suit.”_

_“Did you like me in the suit?”_

_“It was very flattering.”_

_“Would you have sex with someone in a latex suit?”_

_“No.”_

_“Why not?”_

_“I like skin.”_

_“Of course you do.”_

_“Sex with latex instead of sweat isn’t really sex if you ask me.”_

_“Like you’d know.”_

 

He still stayed with his arm over his face, talking up at the ceiling.

 

_“I can imagine.”_

_“Do you?”_

 

His arm came off his face and his eyes panned down to stare at her sitting up on the bed. She put out her cigarette and put the mug on the floor.

 

_“Do_ you _?”_

 

_“Yeah, all the time.”_

_“You’re a boy so of course you do.”_

_“That’s sexist. Bet your mind’s as dirty as mine.”_

_“I wasn’t denying it.”_

 

_“Tell me.”_

_“No.”_

_“Why not?”_

_“Because I don’t want to.”_

_“All girls have the same top three fantasies.”_

_“No they don’t.”_

_“Yeah they do, I read it somewhere.”_

_“Where?”_

_“Some magazine.”_

_“Porn?”_

_“No, something my mom had lying around.”_

_“Yeah, what are the top three?”_

_“You’re a girl you should know.”_

_“That’s clever.”_

_“What?”_

_“You’re not so sneaky way of trying to pick my brain.”_

_“Want to know mine?”_

_“That’s alright.”_

 

She did. He’d tell her, she knew.

 

_“You’re no fun.”_

_“Just because I won’t tell you what turns me on doesn’t mean I’m boring it just means you’re too fucked up to be interested in shit that isn’t about sex.”_

_“Not true.”_

_“Okay fine you’re right but I’m still not telling you, why would you want to know anyway?”_

_“Maybe I’d like to know what turns you on.”_

_“Why did you want to?”_

_“Yeah.”_

 

She’d wondered if he’d meant at that moment or for future reference, it hadn’t mattered she already was.

 

_“Well there’s a difference between fantasy and reality.”_

_“So? Let’s act one out.”_

 

He’d swung up to sit, excited and smiling at the prospect.

 

_“Right now?”_

_“Yeah, why not?”_

He’d loomed closer, like an animal on her bed, prowling closer. She leaned back.

 

_“I just told you.”_

_“Yeah, fantasy, reality, got it. You don’t know what you’d like and what you wouldn’t.”_

_“Yeah, exactly. Don’t worry if I wanted something, I’d ask for it.”_

 

His face was close to hers.

 

_“So you would not like me to kiss you right now?”_

_“You can kiss me if you want.”_

 

It came out without much air and much too hushed.

 

_“What kind of indecisive answer is that?”_

_“Fine, yes. Kiss me.”_

He swooped in and dodged her lips, planted his on her throat. His mouth had been warm, soft, insistent against her pulse.

 

_“What are you doing?”_

_“Kissing you.”_

 

His tongue licked a line under her ear behind the fall of her hair, sucking hot and wet, her chest felt tight and her hand fisted the comforter next to where his had lain flat.

 

_“Yeah.”_

 

She’d breathed, a hand had gone up to cradle the back of his head while her pulse throbbed just as insistent and blunt in her sex.

 

_“Ever have a fantasy about a guy’s face between your legs, licking you?”_

 

His voice had been like a devil on her shoulder whispering in her ear.

 

_“…”_

_“Violet? Did you hear me?”_

 

_“Yes.”_

 

She’d taken a breath before trying to speak again.

 

_“Yeah, fantasy implies slightly unlikely.”_

_“So where’s getting eaten out on the list?”_

_“Definite must.”_

 

He’d leaned back to consider her, she looked at the wall.

 

_“I’ll remember that.”_

_“Yeah it’s not really a fantasy fantasy.”_

_“What’s the difference?”_

_“Well like a fantasy would have to be something that is a little freaky, you know. Something you wouldn’t do every day, like an orgy.”_

 

_“So you want to be in an orgy?”_

 

He’d laughed and she’d smacked herself in the head.

 

_“No, I just mean like an orgy is a sometimes thing. Like how you can’t have icecream and cookies for lunch every day, they’re sometimes snacks.”_

_“Okay what’s you sex fantasy sometimes snack?”_

_“What’s your’s?”_

 

She challenged not wanting to say anything else that he’d remember later and bring up.

 

_“I don’t know maybe like bondage or something.”_

 

Her ears may as well have twitched.

 

_“…seriously?”_

_“Not like whip the shit out of me but you know being tied up or something.”_

 

He nodded and shrugged like it wasn’t some big deal, it was but she refrained from feeling more uncomfortable about the impossible topic they couldn’t possibly have been talking about.

 

_“Kinky.”_

 

_“Okay so I told you, now tell me one.”_

_“When was that exchange discussed?”_

 

_“Come on, don’t be a pussy.”_

 

Fair was fair.

 

_“Fine…I guess, let me think.”_

 

She had a lot of thoughts to sift through; suddenly she’d wanted to top his admission with one of her own.

 

_“You’re blushing.”_

_“I always kind of wondered what it would be like to get spanked.”_

_“…”_

 

He chuckled and then sputtered before letting out a howl.

 

_“Okay, yeah. Laugh. God.”_

 

She put her face in her hands and shook her head.

 

_“Really?”_

_“Yeah, I guess. Is that really weird?”_

 

She peeked up at him under her hair; he’d been smiling and earnest.

 

_“Like put over someone’s knee and just spanked?”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“Nah, that’s kind of hot actually.”_

_“Thanks.”_

_“What about like fight sex?”_

_“Fight sex?”_

_“You know what I mean.”_

 

He nodded at the book on her chair; the movement had brought back his perverse version of story time to her mind.

 

_“Fake rape, yeah I know what you mean.”_

_“Is that what it’s really called?”_

_“I don’t know, that’s what it is though. You know? I mean yeah, maybe.”_

 

He stared like he wasn’t sure if he should move or breath or say anything, there had been absolute silence and her heart skipped a beat and then another, playing hopscotch and she wondered if he suddenly thought she was some sort of depraved person he wanted nothing to do with.

 

_“…”_

 

But then there had been the way his lips parted like he’d been surprised and glad for it. She knew the look, it was turned on. It was sick and she’d really liked the way it’d looked on him.

 

_“Yeah, fight sex is good.”_

 

She nodded.

 

_“You need a safeword for it though.”_

 

He told her. Offhand, not quite paying attention anymore, his mind on lagging behind trying to process.

 

_“…”_

 

She grinned and laughed.

 

_“What?”_

 

_“I had this friend in Boston who moved before I did and she had a weird ass that no matter what jeans she wore she’d get plumber crack going all the time and I’d always yell ‘tangerine’ and she’d know to pull up her pants.”_

_“That’s weird.”_

 

_“I can’t even remember why we chose fruit as our secret language. Or if some slutty chick walked by we’d look at each other and go ‘apricot’ yeah, it was a little weird. I guess.”_

 

_“Persimmon.”_

_“What?”_

_“It’s a good safeword.”_

_“Why would there be a need for a safeword?”_

_“Just in case you want to try a sometimes snack.”_

 

He moved closer and loomed again.

 

_“Oh I see, getting hopeful are you?”_

_“I’ve got a whole list of fantasies.”_

 

He admitted.

 

_“Alright shoot. Tell me another.”_

_“I wanna get blown.”_

 

He’d been so serious it was funny. Like he’d just told her there was a poisonous spider on her face.

 

_“Duh.”_

_“What’s that supposed to mean?”_

 

He started like she’d tried to hit him, his head jerked back just a little but fast.

 

_“You’re a dude, Tate. Of course you wanna get blown.”_

_“Sorry to be so obvious.”_

_“But that’s not a fantasy, that’s normal stuff.”_

 

_“Yeah?”_

_“Oral sex is kind of like a return the favor sort of deal, I think. It’s only fair.”_

_“So you’d…”_

 

She rolled her eyes.

 

_“Well, yeah. But I don’t know, people are weird, like third base is oral sex and a homerun is regular sex and, I don’t know, to me it’s just like there should be regular sex before anything else that’s sex.”_

 

He moved back and gave her space to breathe easier.

 

_“Why?”_

_“I don’t know, maybe it because I’m a girl, getting head is just like…more intimate, I guess than sex, sex.”_

 

There was something about the thought about being exposed that skeeved her and made her squirm at the same time.

 

_“Hmm.”_

 

He’d lain back on her pillows and stretched out his legs next to hers, curled up and compacted close to her body. She hadn’t exactly realized he was absently running a hand over his denim covered thigh until it rubbed at his groin.

 

_“What are you doing?”_

 

She’d squeaked.

 

_“Adjusting myself.”_

_“Wha…-why?”_

 

_“Because this conversation is kind of turning me on.”_

 

She floundered, unable to speak for a moment while he acted like it was okay to be doing what he was doing in her room on her bed with her there.

 

_“Are you serious?”_

_“Deadly serious. I’m really fucking hard right now.”_

_“Oh my god.”_

 

She turned her head away fast, her eyes not content to stare at the wall kept jumping back to his hand moving much too close to the inside of his legs.

 

_“Are you embarrassed? Don’t be.”_

_“I’m not embarrassed.”_

_“Sure you aren’t.”_

_“I’m not!”_

_“Then why aren’t you looking at me?”_

 

_“Because you’re feeling yourself up in_ my _bedroom.”_

_“Used to be mine.”_

 

Her head whipped towards him, down at his hand not even trying to pretend to be ‘adjusting’ anymore, up at his eyes, mischievous and tricky and knowing while he palmed himself through his jeans.

 

_“What?”_

_“You heard me.”_

 

He widened his eyes in an expression that told her he knew that she knew and to come on and get over it and stop pretending like she hadn’t known what he meant.

 

_“…”_

_“Weren’t you trying to remind me with that ghost mojo spiel?”_

_“No.”_

_“Oh. Well yeah, oops. Or maybe not oops, does it matter?”_

_“No.”_

_“Jeez.”_

 

He laughed.

 

_“What?”_

 

She looked back at him.

 

_“We always end up doing this.”_

_“Kind of our thing. Stop doing that.”_

 

She jerked her eyes back up when his hips canted forward lewdly.

 

_“This?”_

_“Yeah , that.”_

_“Why?”_

 

He let out a groan.

 

_“…”_

_“Is it turning you on?”_

_“No.”_

_“…”_

 

He thrusted up.

 

_“Tate, seriously.”_

_“…”_

 

He twisted up and his sneakers bunched up her comforter.

 

_“You’re impossible.”_

_“Me doth think the lady protests too much.”_

_“Bullshit.”_

 

He’d swung up and crowded her space.

 

_“You’re horny.”_

_“Shut up.”_

 

She stared at his throat.

 

_“Really horny.”_

_“I’m going to smother you.”_

_“You make me really horny, all the time.”_

 

She glared up at him, her face hot and her panties soaked under her tights.

 

_“Seriously, enough.”_

_“No.”_

_“…”_

_“I jerk off a lot, you know. More than usual, because of you.”_

_“Why?”_

_“Don’t be dumb, Violet.”_

_“Do you think about me?”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“Oh.”_

_“Oh?”_

_“Good.”_

_“You like that I think about you when I jerk off?”_

_“Yeah.”_

She breathed into his skin, swayed closer, put her hands on his forearms and arched up towards his mouth.

 

_“Do you think about me?”_

_“…”_

 

Her eyes had gone wide, scared.

 

_“When you touch yourself.”_

_“…”_

 

She’d watched him wet his lips.

 

_“You do.”_

_“…”_

 

Her throat felt closed and cinched shut, she couldn’t have talked if she’d had anything to say, she didn’t, she had no voice then.

 

_“I know you do.”_

_“…”_

_“You say my name.”_

 

That much wasn’t true.

 

_“Bullshit.”_

 

She whispered.

 

_“I don’t make any noise, barely any. That’s a little stereotypical though to think girls scream when they cum.”_

 

He smirked and she’d known she’d missed something or been tricked or made a misstep, she just couldn’t find where, her brain refused to backtrack, too keen to stay and process what had been happening at the moment, the way his stare was trained on her mouth, her eyes, her blush, the way her chest rose and fell too fast.

 

_“I know. I meant in your sleep. You talk in your sleep.”_

It hit her and she scurried back on the bed before rolling off and standing, hands fisted at her sides, her eyes wild and face flushed and anger bubbling up under her skin.

 

_“What do you mean you know?”_

_“What do you think?”_

 

The implication of it made her want to cry and scream and hit him. Hard, again and again. Stab him or strangle him.

 

_“Get out.”_

 

She hissed. The idea was too much for her to handle, that he’d watched her, seen her, spied on her while she thought she was alone.

 

_“Oh, come on.”_

 

He pleaded.

 

_“I watch you sleep, sometimes you’re not asleep. I don’t watch, if that’s what you’re worried about, I leave. It’d be weird to watch, like I’m a creepy pervert. And it’s not like I don’t know you get off, so it’s not that big a deal.”_

_“Yes. It is. It’s a huge fucking deal.”_

 

She wanted to yell, but her voice would have cracked so she settled for the horrified hiss she was so fond of.

 

_“Don’t be embarrassed, please. Come on. I’m sorry. I won’t do it anymore, promise.”_

 

There had been sincerity of such a degree that she let her hands uncurl and walked back towards the bed where he chewed his lips nervously, anxious, worried, scared she’d really tell him to leave.

 

_“You really watch me sleep?”_

_“…yeah.”_

_“What about when I wake up?”_

_“I disappear.”_

_“Don’t.”_

_“Okay.”_

 

She sat down and sighed. She tried to let her anger go, it did for the most part. The embarrassment stayed.

 

_“I like it when you stay. It’s nice.”_

 

She admitted looking at the floor.

 

_“Not creepy?”_

_“A little, but nice. Let’s quit talking about this, okay?”_

_“Okay.”_

_“Persimmon.”_

She smiled weakly and looked at him meek and still mortified.

 

_“Persimmon.”_

 

He agreed smiling back.

 

It made her look back at the floor.

 

_“Okay fine.”_

 

The words had left on their own, she waited for the realization to hit her like a brick she didn’t want thrown at her.

 

_“Okay fine, what?”_

 

_“Yes.”_

_“Yes, what?”_

 

She looked up at him and then at her bed.

 

_“I think about you.”_

 

It was a whisper, weak and girly and scared.

 

_“…”_

 

He hadn’t spoken and again she felt like a big weirdo.

 

_“Tate?”_

_“…”_

 

She looked up to see what look he was wearing. When she saw she took a harsh breath through her nose and shoved him.

_“Stop smiling.”_

 

_“Can’t help it.”_

_“You’re being obnoxious.”_

_“How often?”_

_“What?”_

_“Every time you get off you think of me or just sometimes.”_

_“…it didn’t use to be every time.”_

_“But now it is?”_

_“I guess.”_

 

She mumbled wanting to die.

 

_“Cool.”_

_“You’re a creep.”_

 

He shrugged and beamed at her all teeth and gums and appled cheeks.

 

_“When did you start thinking about me like that?”_

_“I don’t know.”_

_“You don’t know?”_

_“Why does it matter?”_

_“Because I want to know.”_

 

_“Before Halloween, I guess, after the break-in stuff.”_

 

_“What do you think about me doing?”_

 

_“Playing a game a scrabble, honestly what do you think? Sex, dumbass. And no I’m not giving you specifics so seriously end of conversation.”_

 

_“Okay.”_

 

He fell back and his mouth had kept twitching, unable to stop curling up, happy, pleased, completely content that she thought about him fucking her when she slipped her hands between her legs at night while he watched her not knowing he watched her and she’d really wanted to die because she knew he was a fucking liar and he’d watched her. She knew because she’d watch him if she was the dead one in the relationship.

 

_“Stop smiling.”_

**The populous and the powerful was a lump, seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—a lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.**

 

“Having fun?”

 

Her father is visiting her mother and she’s laid out on the leather couch in his office, textbooks open on the table with ashes over the pages from her missing the ashtray, the cigarettes he knows are ones she’s found in her father’s desk and the way her stomach concaves under her ribs when she places her arm under her head to pillow it and sucks on the filter of her nicotine fix makes him stare and study her in a way that’s too intense to be innocent or just curious.

 

“I’m surprised he has everything labeled so nicely.”

 

“Who?”

 

“My dad. He’s usually a slob.”

 

“What’d ya find?” He grins at her even though her eyes don’t open while she exhales a drag and sits up.

 

“His session tapes.”

 

The revelation shocks him and he hopes she hasn’t listened to them yet, hopes that by some chance she’s been waiting for him to show up so they could snoop through things together but he highly doubts that hopeless hope.

 

“…”

 

“What?” She asks, her face a mask while taking another drag, her eyes mean little slits, like some cold blooded thing that wants to snap out and strike him, bite, maim, poison, kill. Deadly. Lethal. He doesn’t know if she’s pissed or just reptilian.

 

“You listened to them?”

 

“…”

 

She arches a delicate eyebrow and raises the hand that had been under her head that’s laid in her lap, and there’s the rectangular cassette player in her loose grip. Her thumb depresses a button and his voice talks back to him. Things he’s said about her to her father that he’s thought about, fantasized about and she’s still smoking her cigarette watching the way his face changes from surprised to incredulous to fearful.

 

“I’m gonna go.” He’s already turning when his voice disappears and her’s starts sounding off at his back.

 

“So you can say all those things to him but you won’t do them to me?”

 

“You haven’t asked.” He’s angry.

 

“You haven’t tried.” She looks bored.

 

“Should I?”

 

“You can’t you’re leaving, remember?”

 

And he’s pissed off. He slams the door on his way out, angry at himself and her and everything between them and around them and the way he can hear the tape recorder rewind and his voice behind the door, again and again as she rewinds the tape over and over to hear him talk about her in ways that made her dad want to crack his skull open and just make her stare at him bored, listless, not even slightly amused.

 

**The rivers, the lakes and ocean all stood still, and nothing stirred within their silent depths; ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea and their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropped they slept on the abyss without a surge— the waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, the moon, their mistress, had expired before;**

 

“Want some?” She asks while circling the throat of the bottle with one hand and rolling it’s base in a circle on the floor boards, he waits for it to tip over, it doesn’t but the idea makes him smile, imagining the way she’d scurry to clean up the spill and curse her loose grip and lax concentration. But it doesn’t.

 

“Pyromania?” He nods at the fireplace and how close she sits to the screen keeping popped embers from burning out her eyeballs, her face gleams with the sheen of heat on her temples and mouth.

 

“Cold.”

 

Her voice sounds wrong, like wind in trees, ripples in water and he wonders moments later if she’s spoken at all or if he’s just imagined her response, wonders if he’s ever made a comment or if he’s imagined that too.

 

“It’s really hot in here, Violet.”

 

The room is sweltering and it’s a humid night outside.

 

“…”

 

There’s something in her stare as she turns her head incrementally to acknowledge him, and he feels a distinct sense of unease, primordial fear, he has no idea what brings it but it’s only made deeper when he looks away for a moment and by the time his eyes return to find hers she’s sitting exactly the same way as he’s seen from the doorway before he’d spoken.

 

He doesn’t know why but there’s something eerily wrong with it.

 

“You’re not drunk are you?”

 

“Tired…,” she shrugs, thinking before speaking again, “not really.” She lapses into silence before starting as if there’s something in the fire she’s trying to track with her eyes. “Buzzed, maybe, a little. Sick, can’t breathe right.” And she looks back with her eerie eyes and fireside face, “Bored, horny. Really horny.”

 

“What?”

 

Her head tilts to the barest of angles and he sees that she’s smiling, small and crooked, an expression like jagged ice.

 

“Yeah. Definitely. Super horny.”

 

And he knows why her stare seems wrong, it reminds him of the doll heads in her room trapped inside their fishbowl, bald and bobbing up like koi to the very brim of it, vague and unspecific, not really looking at him at all. He’s surprised when she gets up from the floor and moves to the couch and lies down on her stomach.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

But he knows what she’s doing.

 

“Like you haven’t watched me before.”

 

There’s no accusation in her tone, there’s nothing in it and he can’t do a thing besides stand and stare and watch her hands slip under her hips and inside her pants to rest between the couch and her thighs and then her hips roll forward and back and her eyes open again to give him that stare.

 

“…”

 

It’s like watching someone smother their baby. He only half believes what he’s seeing is happening but wanting to keep watching instead of stopping it and he realizes he’s been holding his breath the same way she is.

 

“Violet, stop it.”

 

She ignores him until he takes a step and almost knocks over the bottle of red wine that’s been in the fridge since her mother stopped drinking it with dinner.

 

“Go away.”

 

Her eyes close and she pummels herself against her hands, her fingers and turns her face into the couch to exhale.

 

“Violet.”

 

He’s ripping an arm out from under her and she’s swinging up, pissed off, violent, ready to smack him.

 

“What’s your problem?”

 

“…”

 

He doesn’t know.

 

“Let go of my hands.”

 

“Are you going to go upstairs and go to bed?”

 

He doesn’t know where the words come from but he knows they’re the right ones.

 

“No.”

 

“…”

 

He doesn’t know what to say to her refusal.

 

“Get out.”

 

“What?”

 

He blinks rapidly at her face, waiting for her to smile like she’s joking. She doesn’t. She isn’t.

 

“Get. Out.”

 

“Why?”

 

“So I can get off.”

 

He’s let go of her hands and moved back to study her, legs curled under her on the couch, dirty hair, ash smudged face, reeking of cigarettes and wine stained pajamas she’s already worn for days.

 

“Fine, do it.”

 

It’s meant to be a challenge he know she won’t take, but she somehow always surprises him, all the time, every time and her anger is gone and she’s back how she was, rubbing at herself through her panties, gasping, choking out breathes, he sits down and tries to find the moments he knows lead up to her coming, he wants to know what her face looks like when she does, because he has watched her but at night her room is dark and he can’t ever catch her face, can’t see how she moves under the swell of her covers, can’t relish how soft her face gets when she turns her cheek into the pillow and closes her eyes, lips parted and moving but without breath puffing out, the way her forehead furrows, how when she needs to inhale she does it through her nose or how she breathes out but throws her whole face in the softness of her pillow, the way she pauses to let her body build up to what she wants, the way her eyes open into tiny slivers of a stare to look at him.

 

Her groan is pushed into the pillow on the couch and her mouth works at it, she circles her hips slowly, trying to get every last spasm she can out of it. She breathes heavy and loud, her face is flushed and her eyes are closed again before she’s turning her face back to the pillow and moving again and he doesn’t quite understand she’s doing it all again until she’s staring at him again.

 

There’s a broken mewl at the end of her exhale when she’s cum again, he realizes he’s hard when the throb goes through his groin at hearing it.

 

“Second one’s always better,” she tells him, sitting up fast and swaying with a head rush while wiping hair from her sweaty face.

 

“I can tell.”

 

His throat is tight.

 

“My dream was about you.”

 

“Dreams about me make you want to make fires?”

 

“No, they just start them.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“Take of your shirt.”

 

“No, Violet.”

 

He shakes his head because he’s not going to make things more awkward for the morning than they already are.

 

“I’m not going to do anything.”

 

But she’s already off the couch and crouching in front of him and he can smell her, wet and needy. She’s already sitting heavily on his lap, bringing him all the way down to the floor under her weight, her hair streaming behind and above her with the motion.

 

“Stop.”

 

It sounds weak even to him because he’s trying to be good, trying to be anything but a boy with a boner, but he is and it’s hard in more way than one to really say no convincingly or stop her from yanking his shirt off and pulling hers off too and sitting back with her breasts pert and pink and damp to make him really look at her.

 

“No. I wanna feel how hot you are.”

 

He wanted to throw her off him but she was suddenly much heavier than he’d allowed himself to notice, like she had iron bones or like his will was made of straw and flammable things and she was all sparks and gasoline.

 

“You’re all sweaty,” he tells her when she’s pressed her chest to his and her mouth is sucking on his jaw.

 

“You were all sweaty in my dream.”

 

She puts a kiss to his skin.

 

“From what?”

 

“Hell.”

 

He starts and looks at her, meets her doll stare, her hands smooth down his stomach and he just barely has enough in him to grab her wrists and hold them between their chests and make his stare another glare.

 

“You said you weren’t going to do anything.”

 

“Guess that makes me a liar.”

 

The words come out like a vicious joke and her eyes go comically crazed and it’s creepier than the blankness.

 

“Violet.”

 

“Like you.”

 

She all but spits it out at him, sour and cruel.

 

“I haven’t lied to you.”

 

“To yourself.”

 

“About what?”

 

“Me.”

 

Her lips pucker and grow a salacious smile.

 

“…”

 

“Purr.”

 

It comes out mocking and it brings back memories of fantasies she’s heard recorded and then replayed over and over just to be able to taunt him, tease him.

 

“Violet, get off.”

 

“No, you’re warm.”

 

“I’m serious.”

 

“Don’t you wanna know how easy I am to get wet?”

 

He wonders what it is she’s really trying to do, the thought steadies him, makes the throb in his cock less sweet and more disturbing than anything.

 

“I already do.”

 

“No you don’t.”

 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

 

“First time sucked.”

 

His face must do something hilarious because she’s got a cat grin stretching her mouth and cheeks and his pride is sore and bruised and she’s hit a nerve and knows it, likes it, wants to do it again.

 

“…”

 

He’s embarrassed and can’t look at her.

 

But her grin dies and her mouth slackens in a tiny oval before she arches into him with her wrists still being bruised by the circle of his fingers around them, between their bodies.

 

“I was so nervous.”

 

“…”

 

She kisses his cheek and his head swims a little at the sweetness of it.

 

“It’s hard to stay turned on when your brain won’t shut the fuck up.”

 

“What’s your point?”

 

“There’s turned on wet and then there’s absolutely fucking soaking.”

 

He stands and leaves her sitting, half-naked, turned-on, amused, and cruel like a child is cruel. He sits in a chair and stares at the wall because he knows he can’t leave, just like he knows he can’t lay her down and peel off the rest of her clothes and do things she’d hate him for after she’s not creepy and delirious and buzzed.

 

She shrugs into her pajama top, leaves it unbuttoned and slides on her knees to the fireplace again, watching and staring like nothing’s happened.

**The winds were withered in the stagnant air, and the clouds perished;**  

 

“Leave it alone.”

 

She doesn’t look up from the scorched skin, the bubble forming on the top of her foot, the seared pain like sandpaper across raw nerve from her jolting limbs twitching too close to the hot grate of the fireplace.

 

“You have to pop blisters for them to scab. And tear off the skin.” She splits the skin and tears it off, plasma leaks out and it stings. She runs her finger down over the spot and hisses, she sucks her teeth and looks up at him. Sitting, staring at the wall, still.

 

Ignoring her, watching her covertly. Trying to pretend he isn’t.

 

“Stop that.”

 

“Stop what?”

 

“Staring at me like that.”

 

“Staring at you like what?”

 

“Like I’m about to be cannibalized.”

 

“Maybe I do want to cannibalize you.”

 

“Maybe I don’t want to be cannibalized.”

 

He does, she knows.

 

“No?”

 

She tries to make her tone sweet enough to have him look at her, he doesn’t and quite suddenly everything about them right then is a game made up of getting him to look at her. She doesn’t quite crawl but it’s close and she comes up fast between his knees before he can shift in the chair, before he can do anything because he’s made a point not to look at her or what she’s doing.

 

He stares at his hand on the leather arm of the chair when he speaks. She traces his knuckles and fingers with her fingertips and puts her other hand on his knee before curving up to press her cheek into his chest, inhale his scent off his shirt and preen against him with a hum.

 

“I’m not in the mood for this Violet.”

 

But he is, she knows and he knows and they both fucking know and for him the realization brings nothing but a festering wash of shame and for her the delicious thrill of making him so conflicted over the threat and tease of her fingers circling low on his stomach, under his shirt, through the thin trail of hair that leads into his pants, that as much as he loves it he loathes it because he’s weak enough to crave it but not strong enough to take it.

 

“What is this?”

 

She stands and teeters in the open space between his legs on the seat of the chair with her knees pressed between his thighs and her hands slamming into leather on either side of his head, it’s cute how hard his chin drops and his eyes follow because her pajamas are gaping and her small chest is right there, and it’s funny when he shakes his head and gets angry.

 

“I’m not playing this game with you. Not now.”

 

And she’s back on the floor, he’s pushed her quite literally away and she has no urge to do anything but smile because it’s all more than slightly hilarious. That he wants to keep her from all the things that make him bad and that he’s finding it hard to believe she’s found them out all on her own.

 

That she likes the taste of it, knows the voracious gnaw of it in her gut like he does. Those dark inky things, like tendrils or tar in her lungs and she’s always close enough to touch them because she’s almost always close enough to touch him and it sticks to her skin, on her fingertips or lips or eyes because she sees it and feels it and touches it as surely as she does him, because it’s all from him.

 

He’s a black hole in rewind time, a supernova, some cosmic occurrence leaking out gamma radiation to speed up her elemental isotope decay on a moral level.

 

And she doesn’t mind, because she’s paid enough attention in chemistry to know that everything has a half-life and even when something is too miniscule to see it’s still there, nothing ever really dies, it just changes. She is. She doesn’t mind it, blips on a timeline he’s told her once and she knows like he knows nothing lasts but everything stays because it’s happened and even when it’s too far away or too small to see it’s still there. There’s bad in him like there’s good in her and they’re just trading pieces and parts and changing, always changing.

 

“When?”

 

She pokes him in the thigh with her toes and he grabs her foot already knowing where it might go next.

 

“When you aren’t acting like this.”

 

“How am I acting?” She cocks her head to the side and stares at him wide eyed and brimming with false childlike naivety that she doubts either of them have ever really felt in their entire lives but are both so good at playing pretend as.

 

“…”

 

He throws her leg off him and turns his head.

 

She falls asleep with her head on his knee and her fingers tearing apart the ragged hem of his pant leg, his fingers are in her hair, rubbing, gentle, nice. It’s enough.

**Darkness had no need of aid from them—**

 

She’s wearing a pair of jeans and it hits him that he’s never seen her in jeans before, it makes her look like someone else and her hair always so meticulously parted straight down the middle is slicked back and it makes her seem like someone else too.

 

Her nails are painted red and she not wearing a bra under the white t-shirt hanging off and on the denim waistline of her jeans, again, someone else.

 

The only thing familiar is the ever present cigarette hanging off her lip and even that looks off because her teeth aren’t buried tight in the filter.

 

“You look like female James Dean.”

 

It’s kind of hot, admittedly, but by no means expected.

 

She’s been playing with the fireplace again, he can smell the burning wood on her and see the black smudges of newspaper ink on her cheeks and nose and chin where her fingers have rubbed it into the skin. There’s a tear in her lip, a red break her teeth try to pick open again.

 

He walks over to her dresser and lets his eyes search for a cheap dollar priced cherry chapstick he knows she keeps on it. When he finds it he pops off the cap with his thumb and strides over to grab her chin and pull her face up to roll it over her mouth an add the weak red flavored shine to them.

 

After he pulls back she wipes it off with her hand, a weak pinkish smear across her palm.

She leans back against the metal of her bed, her body straight and her head turned, every line tight and perfect as if she’s presenting herself off as an object to impact the situation they are involved in that much deeper into his memory.

 

“Why’d you leave?” She speaks to the wall and the window but rolls her eyes back to watch the way his mouth moves when he answers the question.

 

“So you wouldn’t do something stupid.”

 

“Is it stupid if I still want to do it?”

 

Her fingers run over the metal stud of a button holding her jeans closed and her thumb pushes it through the split it’s settled in.

 

“It was stupid before.”

 

“But not now?”

 

“No.”

 

It’s the best idea ever, now. He wonders why it was bad before.

 

“Good.”

 

She leans in and smashes her lips over his and he breaths her exhale, tastes chapstick wax and cigarettes. It lasts for a moment before he shakes his head away and looks down at her.

 

“How do you feel?”

 

“I can breathe enough to smoke and taste it.”

 

“That’s good.”

 

“I’m cold. Wanna stay?”

 

“Yeah,” he breathes.

 

“All night,” she speaks against his lips.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“I’m not tired.”

 

“No?”

 

“No.”

 

He kisses her and her mouth is plaint and warm and sweet to have on his again. He kisses her jaw and she sucks in a shaky breath.

 

“You never told me about your dream.”

 

“It was like you took a bath in sweat and it was getting all over me, but it was good. _So_ fucking good.”

 

“What were we doing?”

 

“Fucking.”

 

“I remember what you’ve told me.”

 

“What have I told you?” It comes out ragged and distracted and he smiles leaning back to look at her.

 

“I’m dead.”

 

“…”

 

There’s nothing except a nod of quiet acceptance.

 

“I’ve liked doing bad things, I remember I did. But I’ve done things that are bad in different ways too to try to fix shit that doesn’t matter that parts of me can’t let go of.”

 

“What parts?”

 

“Parts that don’t like being dead.”

 

“…”

 

“Parts that you don’t like. Parts that don’t get that being dead already fixed everything.”

 

“You lied when you told me you were really here, you weren’t. You _lied_ to me.”

 

“I thought that you liked those parts better, I thought those were what you wanted,” he shrugs; he has nothing else to respond with.

 

“They’re not,” her tone is firm and demanding like the press of her hips against his and her hand on his arm.

 

His fingers unzip her jeans slowly, parting the metal teeth like he’s pulling loose an old scab.

 

“Is this how you want me to be?”

 

“Yes. Okay? _Yes_.”

 

She thrusts forward her hips and nudges his hand, reminds him where it is, he slips his fingers in and shoves his hand down between her legs and learns the difference between wet and soaking, it’s clear enough by how his knuckles are sliding against the inside of her jeans, the inseam just as slick as the outside of her underwear.

 

And if he couldn’t feel the wet cotton in the warm cradle of his palm he’d swear she wasn’t wearing any. He meets her eyes and she’s wearing a secret smile that all but tells him she’s been thinking about things that get her wet for awhile now.

 

He wants to know all of those things. Wants to crawl inside her head and live there if her brain gets her more hot and bothered than he does.

 

“I’m one of those irredeemable people, you know that?”

 

Her face is level with his, a rare thing given their heights and he can feel the press of her chest against his with every measured breath she takes, the type of breathing dying things do so they will remember what it was like when they’re dead.

 

“Do you want to be someone else?”

 

“No.”

 

The secret smile turns into another that’s just for him, it’s a manic little thing with a savage curve and malicious lilt. It looks good on her.

 

“I love you.”

 

After he says it, he’s surprised it’s just spilled out, tumbled, rolled off his tongue; it makes his heart jump like a suicide off a bridge.

 

“Do you need love or do you just want it, Tate?”

 

“I want it. From you.”

 

“Take it.”

 

Her pupils are blown, black eating away all the brown and she rises on her toes, grabbing the rail of her bed with one hand and his shoulder with the other to force her hot little cunt onto his hand, one foot raises to catch the heel of her boot on the metal base of her bed-frame and the hand on his shoulder grabs the back of his neck, sharp red nails cutting crescents into his skin.

 

“I want to fuck you like I did in your stupid dream.”

 

“I was fucking _you_.”

 

“Do it.”

 

She considers him and her mouth twists into a pouty semblance of thought before she pushes him to take a step back and topples herself back over the metal rail of her bed and bounces on the mattress, waving her legs at him, her boots banging against each other.

 

“Why’d you decide to play dress-up?”

 

He pushes up the leg of her jeans to get to the laces of her boot. He yanks at the knotted bow and pulls hard as she pulls out her foot.

 

“I’m a rebel without a cause, different sort of teen angst, you know?”

 

“Yeah, sure. Of course.”

 

Her other boot thumps to the floor loudly and he crawls over her shins and knees and she scoots back on the bed and turns her head to the side so he can go back to sucking on her pulse.

 

“You tried, I know. It’s okay,” she gasps when he sucks and laves at the red circle he’s made on her thin skin.

 

“Hmmm?”

 

She goes rigid and pushes him up, holds his face in his hands and studies his stare and he’s confused by it all.

 

“Holy shit.”

 

“What?”

 

“You are so _dumb_.”

 

She pushes him and sits up before reaching for her bedside table.

 

“Violet.”

 

“Oh shut up.”

 

There’s a razorblade between her fingers and she holds him back with knees and elbows and feet while she cuts into the soft hollow of her inner elbow, there’s an artery there, it’s whole until she bisects it like it’s nothing more than a casual activity instead of a fatal one. There’s blood, hot, red, spilling down her arm and over his hand.

 

“Violet!”

 

He’s got her elbow and arm in his hands and folds it tight before raising her arm above her head and reaches to make a tourniquet of her pillowcase when she chokes out a laugh, there’s blood staining the white cotton stretched over her shoulders and chest and sprayed, misted, over the side of her face.

 

“Relax, I thought you liked dead things.”

 

She tugs her arm back and unfolds it and there’s just wet sticky blood, no cut, no parted flesh, no spraying artery. He rubs his fingers over the inside of her arm and through the blood that clings like a fake tattoo, tacky and turning brown and flaking off as he rubs.

 

“Tate.”

 

“…,” he looks up at her.

 

“Oh come on, like you didn’t know.”

 

“I didn’t.”

 

She looks down at her lap, “…now you do.”

 

He shifts back and she barely acknowledges his movements on the bed next to her. “What now?”

 

Her arm shoots out and her eyes are wild and bright, “Lick it.”

 

“What?”

 

“I lied when I said it was gross.”

 

“Violet,” he soothes, ignoring her arm. She scowls at him and punches the bed lurches up towards his face.

 

“Stop it. I hate when you do that, it’s fucking useless. You’re dead, I’m dead, we’re even, stop thinking about everything, I don’t want to think about what will happen when we forget; I don’t want to think about anything. Okay?”

 

She rocks towards him, hands cinched in his shirt, desperate for him not to be freaked out or scared or anything other than normal over the fact that she’s just as dead as him.

 

“Okay.”

 

He raises the hem of her shirt and she raises her arms.

 

“I think I watched you get rid of my body.”

 

She tugs at his; he yanks it off and covers her body while kicking off his shoes rolling down his socks with his toes.

 

“Did I?”

 

She kisses him before pushing at her jeans; he tugs them down her skinny legs.

 

“Yeah, and you left me flowers.”

 

He pushes her fingers away from his pants and undoes them himself.

 

“How cliché.”

 

She rolls her pelvis into his, he rolls back and she all but whimpers.

 

“You probably thought it was fucking romantic. They were pretty much dead too.”

 

They start speaking only between kisses, and breathing, and the wild surges of their bodies onto each other.

 

“Guess I’m sentimental or something, huh?”

 

“Totally.”

 

“I remember.”

 

“I’ve been writing shit down so I don’t forget.”

 

“That’s good.”

 

“When they sell the house I’m going to have to make it look like I ran away.”

 

“I’ll help.”

 

He pulls her arm from around his neck and licks at the sleeve of blood left on her skin.

 

“I know.”

 

He sucks the splatter from her check and the corner of her mouth.

 

“It was because of the pills I got so sick.”

 

“You mean the other day?”

 

“Overdose causes delirium, drowsiness, screws up your brain so it can’t regulate your body temperature. Wasn’t as bad as it could be I guess.”

 

“Yeah, I guess.”

 

“Died before it ruined my kidneys. That’s good. Sometimes it doesn’t and you suffer for hours.”

 

“Violet let’s stop talking about this, okay?”

 

“I want to forget for awhile.”

 

“Me too.”

 

And her comforter is clean, fluffed instead of drip damp, purple instead of black, her arm is smooth save for the silver lines of little scars, there’s no tang of iron on his teeth,  no wet redness on his tongue, there are no browning, killed by morning frost flowers on her dresser, there’s no memory of dirt underneath his nails.

 

There’s only her little book of secrets tucked away in her nightstand drawer to remind them of who they are and a house that likes to help despite how much it’s going to hurt them because of it.

 

There’s only how slick the outside of her panties are against his prodding fingertips, how needy her tiny hand is against the bulge of his cock under his boxers, how high the heat is cranked up in her room, how precise the prickle of sweat breaking out on their skin feels.

 

Violet remembers her dream.

 

Tate remembers asking about it.

 

She remembers thinking about it all day off and on, adding things in the gaps and spaces being awake took from her and the space existing between dream logic and the nature of reality when awake. Things she’s only come up with while thrusting her cunt into the cradle of her hands and onto the soft, firm rises under her thumbs, mattress pressed under her knuckles and her mouth dragging across her pillowcase.

 

And suddenly she remembers he’s already seen her doing that, getting off and she’d forgotten that she’d done it. A heavy throb goes through her sex, hot and insistent and a flare of blunt aching at just how she’d done it, in front of him, and he’d watched and she’d cum, and he did nothing but watch.

 

He pulls her up and lies back on her bed while her hands rip off the last of his clothing.

 

“No. Up.” She pulls him up to sit and slides her hands under her to pull off her panties as far as she can and he rolls them the rest of the way to her ankles before tossing them somewhere off the side of the bed and she’s situating herself on top of his folded legs.

 

The position requires more posturing than she’d thought it would and he notices the creases in her forehead denoting how hard she’s trying to think.

 

“What’s wrong?”

 

“Ankles.”

 

She’s wrapped an arm around him pulling him towards her as she reaches, lengthens to grab a pillow and place it under her bottom on top of his bony ankles and feet and sits, perched on top of feather down and his legs.

 

Her legs go around his body and she digs fingers into his arms before she takes a breath and raises up.

 

She’s torn between staying hovered above, just barely about to sink down onto him and to actually do it, there’s a dual edge to the prospect of it, of his dick, how she wants it, and she can’t decide which edge she wants to cut her open or whether to do it all at once or inch by agonizing inch.

 

Her breath hitches and she’s unraveling inside someplace in the space between her hips and navel, it’s so much better than before or in a dream or how she’s imagined when she’s alone, the mess of sensation ballooning and spilling in and it’s what hollow and whole feel at the same time and she wants to make a word for it but she can’t because he’s all velvet heat sinking in and she can feel the throb of his blood heavy and a gentle nudge with the slow wet drag of her body over and around him.

 

There’s comfort, the kind only found in absolute exhaustion and the perfect spot to sleep, now. She’s sated and sleepy and her insides clasp around him and it feels good enough to do again and again and again because any semblance of nonexistent space between them is still too much.

 

He groans low and guttural and it makes heat flare between her shoulder blades, insistent and deep straight from her bones, her spine and she can’t help but keen back at him, into his skin and his sweat.

 

She’s tethered with one heel pressed into the bottom of his spine and the other digging into the mattress, one arm binding his chest to hers with the press of it heavy across his shoulder the other draped lazy over the sharpness of her wrist, her hand cradling the weight of his skull, her bowed brow damp against his swollen mouth.

 

There’s a sweet sore ache and burn in her thigh when she moves and her sigh is a hissed rasp, her hands barely keep their grip on his shoulders, sticky and hot, but she’s raised up far enough to almost slip off of him all together and she circles the swell of him wet and slick from being in her and the tease of it makes her sex clench and arousal dampen and pink the tender inside of her thighs and she feels like a rabid animal, starving, and greedy already thinking of the next time he’s going to be in her.

 

Her leg shakes and it hurts, cramps and she feels the murmur of his voice against her throat before or after or sometime between his tongue rolling up lick a stripe to the underside of her chin.

 

“Yeah, fuck me. Violet.”

 

The slap their bones and skin and heat makes when she takes him all at once, flays herself open or liquefies their pelvises sends a spasm through her as much as the feel does. He arches up, jerks violently, unnaturally pulled or pushed or thrown up at her, into her. He’s as much a mess as she is.

 

She feels sweat roll down from her brow and over her eyelid, it blinds her while she blinks it away and she barely wonders where all the oxygen in the room went, where all the heat came from, because it doesn’t matter because his palm is cradling her ass and his fingers are melded into her thigh and all she wants to do is melt and moan.

 

It’s different from before, the feel, the way her body moves, how he feels, it’s good. Her legs are weak and refuse to lift her after another few strokes, she’s almost come undone anyway and settles for rocking against him, grinding her clit into his pubic bone and she cries out on his shoulder with her teeth and tongue and wet suction of her mouth mimicking the way her insides shudder around the thick heat and hardness of him in her.

 

“Please.”

 

Hers eyes drift up and catch his expression, his bottom lip red and stripped from his teeth, her mind is hazy and thick and her thoughts swim through the stew of the foggy feel.

 

“Come on, come on.”

 

His fingers rub into her leg, tense, hard.

 

“Violet. Please.”

 

She can’t focus, and she runs her gaze down a track of sweat from his hairline to the middle of his cheek. He shifts, and squirms and has been glaring down at her for awhile before she notices, dumbly, unconcerned, dreamy.

 

“ _Move_.”

 

And she stares back for a moment before it connects in her brain that he’s _begging_ her to move, to keep going, that he’s desperate to cum and she’s been too secluded somewhere inside her own dazed state to really notice.

 

She lets go of his shoulders and falls back, his hand supporting her under her shoulders as if she’s fallen but she thrust up weakly and his face changes and his hand yanks the pillow out from under her, his legs unfold and he rocks back on his heels pulling her closer, pushing in further.

 

There’s a moment when he pulls his hips back and slips from her and she doesn’t know whose voice is the one that lets out a thin whine, she thinks it’s his but it might have been hers and he fumbles  for a moment, and it’s alright because when he’s back inside he’s snapping his hips and she groans, feet sliding on the bed, knees pointed, hands twisting in the sheets above her head, chest pressed up, spine bending and he looks down at her from under the fall of his sweat soaked hair and thrusts between every hard huff and puff.

 

He smirks when she says his name, at the way it sounds, at how she twists across the sheets.

 

“Gonna ruin you.”

 

“Yeah. Yes.”

 

 

There’s a hard toss of his pelvis, over and over, and she thinks it might hurt if she wasn’t so swollen inside, so keen on forgetting that there’s anything but him left in the world.

 

She feels the throb of him, the twitch, the way there’s a sudden burst of hot warmth and she smirks and he grins back, devilish and boy-like, maybe a little self-depreciating but it fits and she grinds out a groan when he pulls out and falls heavily at her side on his stomach, one eye peeking open to stare at her she catches his gaze and watches it move to where her hand slips between her thighs to slip through the wet slide of how messy sex is.

 

He rolls onto his back and watches rapt, breathing hard before she throws a leg over him and rubs against his hip until she’s shaking in need and finally cums, again. They breathe and doze and their sweat cools. It’s nice she decides. Her thoughts spin in lazy spirals.

 

The only way to get happy endings is to stop when there is one, to close the book, to leave the thing undone, to never ever indulge in the thrill of curiosity, satisfaction and happiness are two different creatures and they’re far past the point of sweet cloying rose water and soul mate happiness. There is no place in the sun for them, no poetic breakdown of their existences side by side in bedrooms and basements and backyards and beaches, no absolute moment where they’ve stopped and neglected to go further just because they could.

 

They have.

 

Because they’re both more than a little selfish, and they’ve got eternity to play with and curiosity to get rid of nine lives times ninety-nine and even if there was a Romeo and Juliet part deux it’d still turn out as a farce, because romance is always tragic nonexclusive to the parties involved.

 

There’s simply nothing else to do, they’ve refused to throw the book away at the happy spot in the sun and walk on without knowing how things really turn out, filled with the idealistic ever after that’s as elusive as it is nonspecific.

 

And she figures that no one really knows what ever after feels like because they’ve stopped or they didn’t and they died which is still just stopping in a different sort of way but she’s dead and things haven’t stopped so she’s stuck with ever after just like him and there’s nothing else to do but wait and watch and amuse themselves.

 

She finds the prospect of nothing after the ever after apt, funny, tragic, but mostly boring and the house knows just like she does, just like he does and it will help in the way it always does, making them think that their broken pieces meld them together into the same thing, but they aren’t and they know but the house can help that too.

 

They can get their shared nonspecific perfect happy sunny ever after if they forget they’ve already finished the book and all the parts past everything that make them remember things that go past happy and tragic and funny and boring and satisfied.

 

He falls asleep.

 

She pads across her bedroom and sweeps her arm down to pick his mustard yellow cardigan off the floor, it’s too big and the buttons start at her navel but she wears in anyway knowing no one’s around to catch her naked with her boyfriend’s clothes on. She goes to her nightstand.

 

Her grip on the leather notebook is lax and as she goes downstairs, each step measured and purposeful. The library hides it’s murals behind wallpaper but she knows what they look like, she’s dreamed about them too, she dreams about a lot of things lately.

 

The fireplace is ignited and burning already and it’s the house and no one living or dead that’s made it.

 

All it takes is a flicked wrist and a sigh and it’s done. The leather cover curls and the pages are eaten away into orange lace and it’s done.

 

She burns the book of all their secrets so she can forget she’s read them. So she can learn them again on her own, over and over.

 

It’s melodrama at its best with all its stock characters and emotional overuse and grand themes that are only around to keep everyone arguing and fucking and falling in love.

 

Watching it burn with her hands fisted down deep in the pockets of the cardigan, making bulges in the fabric and stretching it tight across her shoulders, she thinks it’s the perfect way to spend eternity, maybe the only way. Maybe they just have to go on like they’re living, maybe there is no other option but oblivion and she’s not so worn out and tired that she wants that.

 

Now that she’s dead and going to forget it the over and overs aren’t so dumb, they’re appealing.

 

She wants a cigarette and takes one from the pack in the pocket her hand is fisted in knowing with absolute clarity that she’d left her cigarettes upstairs. She guesses things could be worse than being stuck in a house that likes to be helpful.

 

There are matches on top of the fire place she moves to, the heat hurting the half healed burn on the top of her foot that she also knows with absolute clarity wasn’t there for awhile.

 

Warming her bare legs and leaning her arms on the mantel she smiles.

 

“Still cold?”

 

“No,” she shakes her head, “not anymore.”

 

He’s put on his boxers and she finds him an adorable picture of post-coital sleepy boy bliss. She wants to tell him he looks cute but refrains because he’d laugh and tell her she’s cute and she’d have to scowl and hit him because that’s how things are supposed to be.

 

And for awhile she wants to remember how the story ends. She wants to pretend that they get a happy ending worth stopping at.

 

When he walks over he puts his forehead on the back of her neck and mumbles before picking his head up and putting his chin in the hollow between her neck and arm opening his mouth for a drag off her cigarette.

 

She’s raising her hand while his fingers lift up the hem of his cardigan.

 

“You’re not wearing any panties.” He chastises all sing-song with his tone and she bumps her head into his.

 

“Come on I want to take a nap.”

 

“Okay. You’re gonna leave the fire going?”

 

“It’ll go out by itself.”

 

**She was the Universe.**

**Author's Note:**

> Reference's to Shakespeare, Anne Rice's "Witching Hour", and Byron's "Darkness"


End file.
